Questions tagged [ho.history-overview]
History and philosophy of mathematics, biographies of mathematicians, mathematics education, recreational mathematics, communication of mathematics.
1,532 questions
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Was Fermat's Last Theorem known for infinitely many primes before Wiles?
Before Andrew Wiles's 1997 proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, in 1985, Étienne Fouvry et al. proved that the first case of FLT holds for infinitely many primes $p$.
Is there any infinite class of primes ...
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Coste’s 1985 manuscript “La démonstration de Diaconescu du théorème de Barr”?
An unpublished manuscript of Coste is cited in a couple of papers of Peter Johnstone, for some observations on what we now know as the Diaconescu cover. The manuscript is cited as “M. Coste, La ...
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Joshua Lederberg's influence on graph theory
Joshua Lederberg received a the Nobel prize in medicine in 1958 and he was a major contributor to the Stanford DENDRAL software expert system that
Given a mass spectrum of an organic molecular sample ...
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Stalin's comment and the immunity of mathematics
In 1948 Stalin made an exception for mathematics from the general rule
that every science is involved in class struggle. In a comment on a
text by Lysenko making such a generalized claim, Stalin ...
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English translation of Grothendieck's "Récoltes et Semailles" by Leila Schneps?
I was looking online for English translation of Grothendieck's "Recoltes et Semailles" and found this answer on Mathoverflow:https://mathoverflow.net/a/466392/151209 by Leila Schneps.
She ...
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Some historical questions on the Italian school of algebraic geometry
I should preface these questions about the Italian school of algebraic geometry by stating that I'm asking for the sake of a short story. This means two things for the sorts of answers that would be ...
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What is the oldest annual number theory conference?
I have sometimes asserted that West Coast Number Theory is the oldest annual number theory conference, mostly because nobody has contradicted me when I say it. Is this true?
WCNT started in 1969, with ...
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Chickenwire models of the sphere eversion: do they still exist?
I recently became aware of the following video from 50 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSk8XkPALus
Does anyone know what happened to the amazing chickenwire models of the sphere eversion ...
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Portrait of Takuro Shintani
I don't know if this question is appropriate but I'll ask it anyway (my apologies, for any kind of disturbance this might cause): One of my mathematical heroes is the Japanese mathematician Takuro ...
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Mathematical theories that fell apart and didn't recover [duplicate]
Question: Are there any "major" mathematical theories in which people have found fundamental flaws from which the theory did not recover?
I'd rather not define "major", but I mean ...
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Do mathematicians have an ethical role to play, regarding the AI bubble? [closed]
In the 2007 bubble, economists but even mathematicians had their reputations stained somewhat, especially "financial mathematicians". Because they knew what was going on, and they didn't ...
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Why Zermelo postulated the existence of a set with no finite limit to the ranks of its elements?
The original Zermelo set theory explicitly allowed for urelements.
What was the reason that led Zermelo to formulate the Axiom of Infinity in terms of the existence of a set of the kind that has an ...
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What happened to the second volume of Scharlau's biography of Grothendieck?
I am not sure whether this is the right place to ask this question, but I do not know a better place. Feel free to close it if you think that it is off-topic.
I recently discovered that the number ...
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Alternative, descriptive terminology for "Kleisli category"
Every monad is induced canonically by two universal adjunctions, introduced respectively by Kleisli and by Eilenberg and Moore. Since neither paper introduced names for the corresponding categories, ...
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Where can one find the page of corrections to Lehner–Newman's Weierstrass point paper?
In Ogg, Andrew P., Hyperelliptic modular curves, Bull. Soc. Math. Fr. 102, 449-462 (1974). ZBL0314.10018. p. 450, there is the sentence:
“As LEHNER and NEWMAN noted in a page of corrections attached ...
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