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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More on "Transalgebraic Theories" (a 19th century yoga)?
Among the talks at occasion of the Galois Bicentennial, one is about "Transalgebraic Theories". Unfortunately I found only this article (Wayback Machine, arXiv:1707.01770) describing that ...
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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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How might mathematics have been different?
I think most people believe that mathematical truths are logically necessary. The fact that $\sqrt{2}$ is irrational doesn't depend on who proved it, when they proved it, whether they liked it, or ...
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The most outrageous (or ridiculous) conjectures in mathematics
The purpose of this question is to collect the most outrageous (or ridiculous) conjectures in mathematics.
An outrageous conjecture is qualified ONLY if:
1) It is most likely false
(Being hopeless is ...
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Is amateur research in mathematics viable?
After a long reflection, I've decided I won't go to graduate school and do a thesis, among other things. I personally can't cope with the pressure and uncertainty of an academic job.
I will therefore ...
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How to find ICM talks?
I am very interested in reading some and skimming through the list of invited talks at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Since the proceedings contain talks supposedly by top experts in ...
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Pseudonyms of famous mathematicians
Many mathematicians know that Lewis Carroll was quite a good mathematician, who wrote about logic (paradoxes) and determinants. He found an expansion formula, which bears his real name (Charles ...
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Unrigorous British mathematics prior to G.H. Hardy
I was looking at a bio-movie of Ramanujan last night. Very poignant.
Also impressed by Jeremy Irons' portrayal of G.H. Hardy.
In G.H. Hardy's wiki page, we read:
Hardy cited as his most important ...
CommunityBot
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Major mathematical advances past age fifty
From A Mathematician’s Apology, G. H. Hardy, 1940:
"I had better say something here about this question of age, since it is particularly important for mathematicians. No mathematician should ever ...
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Brief history of cardinal characteristics of the continuum
Cardinal characteristics of the continuum (CCC) are cardinals which are associated with naturally arising combinatorial properties of "the continuum".
The reason that "the continuum&...
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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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Grothendieck on polyhedra over finite fields
In Grothendieck's Sketch of a Programme he spends a few pages discussing polyhedra over arbitrary rings and concludes with some intriguing remarks on specializing polyhedra over their "most ...
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In search of an early picture of Max Dehn
I am trying to find a copy of a picture "Mathematische Gesellschaft:
Group Portrait, Faculty, University of Göttingen (1899)."
This picture was published by Springer-Verlag as a poster in 1985,
but ...
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Earliest use of $\lesssim$ for inequality up to constants
When I was a graduate student, I was highly influenced by the work of Bourgain, particularly his 1991 paper
Bourgain, J., Besicovitch type maximal operators and applications to Fourier analysis, Geom. ...
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Video lectures of mathematics courses available online for free
It can be difficult to learn mathematics on your own from textbooks, and I often wish universities videotaped their mathematics courses and distributed them for free online. Fortunately, some ...
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