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History of Science and Mathematics

Excavator

 Excavator
Edit first post that was inactive for 6 months.
Awarded 135 times.
Why is the action from the principle of least action traditionally denoted $S$?
Awarded Feb 23 at 6:28
What is the first usage of the term "Adjoint" and why was this word chosen?
Awarded Dec 12, 2025 at 5:08
What did Tim-Berners Lee mean with "HTTP also allows index search" in his paper "World wide web: The Information Universe"?
Awarded Dec 3, 2025 at 6:18
Where does the name eigenvalue come from?
Awarded Oct 20, 2025 at 4:46
Reference request concerning an alleged Jewish contribution to the early theory of light refraction, and to the first geometry textbook in Europe
Awarded Sep 14, 2025 at 4:34
Why was the question of the nature of light limited to the wave theory or the particle one? [closed]
Awarded Sep 7, 2025 at 4:34
How has the modelling of classical electrodynamics changed since Maxwell?
Awarded Aug 21, 2025 at 4:10
Looking for Cantor's correspondence
Awarded Jun 6, 2025 at 5:13
Conventional orientation of axes in scientific plots
Awarded Mar 27, 2025 at 4:08
Meaning of passages by Gauss on the "convergence of expansions (in infinite series) of the (elliptical) equation of the center"?
Awarded Mar 12, 2025 at 4:23
History of difference equations
Awarded Jan 27, 2025 at 4:16
Why are quaternions more popular than tessarines despite being non-commutative?
Awarded Jan 20, 2025 at 4:46
Source of a Poincaré quote: "Logic sometimes makes monsters..."
Awarded Dec 25, 2024 at 4:53
Who enunciated each postulate of modern Quantum Mechanics?
Awarded Dec 4, 2024 at 4:20
In history of algebra, who was the first to add one equation to another equation?
Awarded Nov 3, 2024 at 4:25
Old unsolved questions in mathematics
Awarded Sep 15, 2024 at 4:41
Was the concept of zero ever developed without relation to positional number systems?
Awarded Aug 3, 2024 at 4:13
What's the famous story about a mathematician who gave a talk without saying a word?
Awarded Jun 19, 2024 at 4:25
Are there any well known mathematicians who were fascists?
Awarded Jun 17, 2024 at 6:35
What famous theorems or results were proven by female mathematicians?
Awarded Jun 7, 2024 at 4:10
Historical examples of "pseudoscience" becoming "science"
Awarded May 3, 2024 at 4:34
Woman who contributed to Watson & Crick's discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA
Awarded Mar 19, 2024 at 4:11
Was Gauss aware of the non-euclidean implications of his work on modular forms?
Awarded Mar 12, 2024 at 4:02
Entry 97 in Gauss's diary and the status of "lunar parallax" in the late 18th century
Awarded Feb 20, 2024 at 5:08
Is there any example of a long-standing mathematical conjecture whose resolution did not require advanced knowledge?
Awarded Feb 17, 2024 at 4:20
How did Eratosthenes determine that Alexandria and Syene were on the same meridian?
Awarded Feb 13, 2024 at 4:25
Why isn't the symbol for Beryllium 'B' rather than 'Be'?
Awarded Dec 15, 2023 at 4:21
Does Blum's speedup theorem have any conceptual predecessors?
Awarded Oct 5, 2023 at 4:36
How could the people of the past be sure that $a \times b = b \times a$?
Awarded Aug 3, 2023 at 5:04
Is the Scientific Method uniquely Western?
Awarded Jun 23, 2023 at 4:50
Who were the attendees to the SGA3 seminar?
Awarded Apr 8, 2023 at 4:32
Why did "cold fusion" come to mean Fleischmann-Pons fusion instead of μCF?
Awarded Mar 1, 2023 at 4:07
What is the history behind the concept of "schemes" in algebraic geometry?
Awarded Jan 23, 2023 at 5:15
Where are the mirrors of historic telescopes today?
Awarded Jan 18, 2023 at 4:15
Historical examples of "pseudoscience" becoming "science"
Awarded Jan 17, 2023 at 4:55
Who was the first to say "Shut up and calculate!"?
Awarded Jan 7, 2023 at 4:09
In which article/book chapter did Cantor, Hilbert, and Poincaré formally define or directly discusse the term “potential infinity”?
Awarded Jan 7, 2023 at 4:09
Hydrogen electrode and its electrode potential
Awarded Dec 30, 2022 at 4:40
What is so mysterious about Archimedes' approximation of $\sqrt 3$?
Awarded Nov 30, 2022 at 4:55
How did Roger Cotes come up with logarithm form of Euler formula?
Awarded Nov 18, 2022 at 8:20
Did any famous physicists think nuclear weapons were impossible?
Awarded Nov 15, 2022 at 4:10
What attracted Einstein to the anomalous precession of Mercury?
Awarded Nov 12, 2022 at 5:26
What attracted Einstein to the anomalous precession of Mercury?
Awarded Nov 2, 2022 at 4:42
What was the "libration of Pallas" that Gauss studied, when Pallas is not a moon of Jupiter?
Awarded Sep 29, 2022 at 4:35
What was the real need of divergence and curl operators?
Awarded Aug 31, 2022 at 5:46
Questions regarding "Two New Sciences" by Galileo Galilei
Awarded Jun 25, 2022 at 4:41
Why is Sophie-Germain's Identity popular?
Awarded Apr 23, 2022 at 4:15
Original Statement and Proof of Chebyshev’s $\vartheta(x) \sim x$
Awarded Apr 3, 2022 at 4:11
What was the historical context of the development of Taylor series?
Awarded Mar 17, 2022 at 4:26
What did Einstein contribute to Special Relativity that hadn't already been done by Lorentz in 1904 and Poincaré in 1905?
Awarded Mar 11, 2022 at 21:11
What was the connection between David Hilbert and Stefan Banach?
Awarded Mar 6, 2022 at 4:17
Was there a period of doubt in the history of the Higgs mechanism?
Awarded Feb 15, 2022 at 4:10
Why did algebraic geometry need Alexander Grothendieck?
Awarded Jan 22, 2022 at 6:06
Who discovered smooth non-analytic functions of a real variable?
Awarded Dec 24, 2021 at 4:56
Name of Polaris before it became a pole star?
Awarded Dec 18, 2021 at 4:02
$\epsilon$-$\delta$ definition of continuity
Awarded Dec 13, 2021 at 8:20
How did mathematicians notate the empty set before $\varnothing$?
Awarded Sep 28, 2021 at 4:36
Was fake/rigged data common prior to the 20th century?
Awarded Sep 1, 2021 at 7:51
Sine of 0.72 and pi [closed]
Awarded Aug 27, 2021 at 5:01
How did Eratosthenes know the distance between Aswan and Alexandria?
Awarded Jul 23, 2021 at 5:46
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