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Who influenced Gauss in his abstract approach to mathematics?
I have studied that Gauss was one of the firsts mathematicians to defend this idea, about the Abstract Math and the conception of number, claiming that "What is calculated (in the sense of things already counted) are not substances (thinkable…
Lucas Barbiere
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How did Born come up with the Canonical Commutation relation ($\hat X \hat P-\hat P\hat X=i\hbar$)?
All answers to questions like this dodge the question by saying it's a postulate of Matrix Mechanics, so let me rephrase it. Instead of how to derive the CCR, how does it follow from Heisenberg's matrices:
$$\hat…
Phineas Nicolson
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Source of cartoon lampooning Felix Klein
There is an interesting cartoon in the book
Lillian Hoddeson, Ernst Braun, Jurgen Teichmann, Spencer Weart (Eds.) Out of the Crystal Maze: Chapters from The History of Solid State Physics. Oxford Univesity Press, 1992 (online here)
The cartoon…
Mikhail Katz
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What is the origin of French/Burmester's curves?
French curves are a set of curvilinear rulers used in industrial design, before the advent of CAD, when everything still had to be drawn by hands.
The most popular set of such rulers is made up of 3 rulers chosen among a set of 28 that were…
Nicola Ciccoli
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Corpuscular theory of light and Double slit experiment
I am sure many scientists would initially have attempted to explain Young's double slit experiment's results using the concept of light as a stream of particles. Can somebody tell me what these attempts were and how they failed?
futurePast
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Who was the first known mathematician to graph an equation?
A friend of mine pointed out that there were no graphs in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, which was published in 1776. This surprised me because René Descartes (1596-1650) is well known as being the inventor of the coordinate plane, but I…
Ceasar
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Nature of Fermat's friend Lalouvère's activities as censor?
Fermat had a friend at Toulouse named Lalouvère. Lalouvère was censor, jesuit, and mathematician (in alphabetical order).
Antonella Romano writes on page 512 of her book La Contre-Réforme Mathématique. Constitution et diffusion d'une culture…
Mikhail Katz
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Did Gödel know about Turing degrees in 1946?
A much quoted passage from Gödel is the opening section of his Remarks before the Princeton bicentennial conference on problems in mathematics (1946) where he praises Turing's Turing machine model of computation as being philosophically well…
Not_Here
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Who originally derived the general force law equation of force between current elements?
Wikipedia credits this to Maxwell. This derivation can be found in Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism vol. 2, part 4, ch. 2 (§§502-527). I went through the derivation and found two self cancelling mistakes made by Maxwell. Those…
Joe
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Dirichlet integral's history
I was calculating the so-called Dirichlet Integral,
$$\displaystyle \int_{0}^{\infty}\frac{\sin x}{x} \text{d} x$$
and then I wondered about his name and history:
Why it has the name of Dirichlet?
When was it first calculated?
In what context it…
Elías Guisado Villalgordo
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When was $e$ first observed to not be a Liouville number?
When and by who was it first observed that the transcendental number $e$ is NOT a Liouville number?
This fact is stated in a lot of web pages, and a proof can be found in the Mathematics Stack Exchange question Why is $e$ not a Liouville number?,…
Dave L Renfro
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About Sobolev Inequalities
i'm interested in the history of the 2 Sobolev Inequalities. The Gagliardo-Nirenberg-Sobolev inequality and Morrey inequality as here Sobolev inequality .
How did these two inequalities arise? What is the context of its emergence? In what year were…
Cézar Bezerr
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How did Aristotle influence Euclid?
In other words, how is Aristotle's logic represented in Euclid's Elements?
I have read many articles where Euclid's Elements is linked to Aristotle's logic, but I do not understand, and I can't find any examples explaining how deductive logic (i.e.…
chris
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Looking for books on the history of chemistry?
I'm looking for good books on history of chemistry and chemical methodology. There appear to be surprisingly few available on the market based on my own 'research' (just googling and phrase-searching for different variations on…
user51309
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What's the origin and meaning of the adjective "free" in mathematics?
It's pretty common to call a group, ring or module free when it has a 'basis', but unlike other mathematical definitions whose names can be easily related to the concept they describe (e.g. the spectrum of an operator), the name free hardly tells me…
hjhjhj57
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