Skip to main content
MathOverflow

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

23
  • 16
    $\begingroup$ If we had truly lost it, can you expect us to know enough about it to tell you? Gerhard "Still Looking For A Proof" Paseman, 2012.05.09 $\endgroup$ Commented May 9, 2012 at 22:03
  • 8
    $\begingroup$ I had some mathematics in my pocket the other day, but I seemed to have lost it. Perhaps it is just buried in the mess of my desk... $\endgroup$ Commented May 9, 2012 at 22:34
  • 23
    $\begingroup$ Didn't something along these lines happen to Italian algebraic geometry in the 1930s? see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_school_of_algebraic_geometry for example $\endgroup$ Commented May 9, 2012 at 23:13
  • 12
    $\begingroup$ This sounds like a different phenomenon from the one that you are refering to (is it?), but Indian Mathematics, Chinese Mathematics, Babylonian Mathematics, etc. were effectively "lost" (at least in large part), and have only recently been partially "rediscovered" as "archeology". More recently, 19th century invariant theory. It wasn't that they were false; it was that numerical methods became less valuable for these problems, because general methods were discovered, or else the calculations didn't draw enough attention because of lack of practical applications. $\endgroup$ Commented May 10, 2012 at 0:06
  • 15
    $\begingroup$ According to cecm.sfu.ca/organics/covering/html/node4.html, "We have reached the point of decay in some areas. Richard Askey has observed that Gregory Chudnovsky knows things about hypergeometric functions that no one has understood since Riemann and that, with Chudnovsky's eventual passing, no one is likely to understand again." I've wondered what this refers to, but I've never asked Askey whether this quote is accurate or what he meant. $\endgroup$ Commented May 10, 2012 at 4:25