Use this tag for questions concerning history of mathematics, historical primacies of results, and evolution of terminology, symbols, and notations.
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What is the initial reason to define the evolute of a curve?
The evolute of a curve is defined as the envelope of the normals or as the locus of the center of the osculating circle.
What is exactly "the envelope of the normals" ?
What is the reason to ...
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29 views
Mathematics and Language: An Outlet For Opinion [closed]
Why does mathematics exist as such a liquid language of thought? Is it really the universal language? Is this a naive question?
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What is the reason of the naming of the “simplex method”?
What is the reason of the naming of the "simplex method"?
Is there any method other than simplex? Or it has any other cause?
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1answer
39 views
Is the Knuth arrowup notation defined for non-natural exponents?
I recently found out about Knuth's arrowup notation. Wikipedia, among other websites, only shows a definition for $a \uparrow^n b$ where $n \in \Bbb{N}_0, a \in \Bbb{R}, b \in \Bbb{N}$ as following:
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73 views
Math is a young man's game? [closed]
Do you agree with this quote from Hardy? Supposedly someone is in their prime between ages 18-25.I don't think I agree with this, since most of the people doing research and advancing math are ...
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Gray's “Plato's Ghost” - a curious mistake
I am currently reading Jeremy Gray's "Plato's Ghost", and I run into the following passage (Chapter 5, page 332). The point is, it seems to me that it contains two very elementary mistakes that feel ...
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2answers
139 views
Isn't seven bridges problem trivial? [closed]
What was the actual actual problem that led Euler to graph theory?
By looking even at non-simplified map like this
It is obvious that, if a landmass is connected by odd number of bridges, it ...
4
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3answers
146 views
why is variance so famous that it appears in almost half of the probability textbook? [closed]
why is variance so famous that it appears in almost half of the probability textbook?
What is its significant history so that a statistical model would appear in such textbooks and what does it help ...
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1answer
53 views
The 633 reducible configurations of the 4 color Theorem
Ken Appel died a few days ago, and I wanted to see how long it took to perform the four color theorem proof now, with modern systems. At the Four Color Theorem page, there is a link given for the ...
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Information of paraproduct
I am studying paraproduct nowadays, mostly the interplay(or application) with Fourier transform and as a tool to formulate some integrals(Young's, stochastic one,etc.).
As mentioned in this notice, ...
2
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1answer
82 views
Carl Friedrich Gauss and the 'useless' FFT in 1805
This is a history question, so you need to know something about math history to answer it.
There's a rumour that says that Carl Friedrich Gauss knew the FFT in 1805, but he thought it was useless, ...
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3answers
92 views
Where can I find a good comprehensive read about the history of Mathematics?
I'm doing a Bachelor of Pure Mathematics in Unisversity, and while reading through the book that outlines the course selections, I found one that is listed as "rarely offered", which the department ...
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History of ' low-dimensional geometry '
I want to have a brief history about the low-dimensional manifolds and geometric structures on manifolds specially on low-dimensional manifolds .where I can read about thus ?
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739 views
On a 500 page proof
On wikipedia there is a claim that the Abel–Ruffini theorem was nearly proved by Paolo Ruffini, and that his proof spanned over $500$ pages, is this really true? I don't really know any abstract ...
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3answers
240 views
What have been some of the most revolutionary philosophical shifts in perspective in mathematics?
Often times, great revolutions in mathematics come from shifts in philosophical perspective. The shift from extrinsic to intrinsic geometry yields manifolds (and much else). The shift in focus from ...
