While browsing the Net for some articles related to the history of the Whittaker-Shannon sampling theorem, so important to our digital world today, I came across this passage by H. …

In January, 1949, Shannon publishes the paper Communication in the Presence of Noise, Proc. IRE, Vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-21, available here, which establishes the Information Theory …

Oliver Heaviside, on page 387 of Electrical Papers, Vol. I, Macmillan and Co., 1892, available here, writes $$v = 1 - \frac{n^2r^2}{2^2} + \frac{n^4r^4}{2^2 4^2} - \frac{n^6r^6}{ …

The last remaining problem in this whole "everything is a sphere" business, is the Smooth Poincare Conjecture in dimension 4: If $X\simeq_\text{homo.eq.} S^4$ then $X\approx_\text{ …

According to Wikipedia's entry on Gauss: "Though Gauss had been up to that point supported by the stipend from the Duke, he doubted the security of this arrangement, and also did …

I'm searching for the original reference of a quote that went something like: "Errors in a mathematics text add an element of surprise to an otherwise predictable plot." I believ …

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. Fortun …

Recently I encountered a new phenomenon when I tried to submit a paper to arXiv. The paper was an erratum to another, already published, paper and will be published separately. I g …

Hello, everybody. I'm looking for some reference about the Poincaré-Cartan form, I do not know how it is defined, I just know that it is used in Lagrangian mechanics but I have not …

The history of mathematics over the last 200 years has many occasions when the fundamental assumptions of an area have been shown to be flawed, or even wrong. Yet I cannot think of …

Does anybody know why the genus (arithmetic or geometric) of a curve was historically denoted by $p$ ($p_a$ and $p_g$)? What does the letter "$p$" stand for? Any references would …

I thought that the closed question here could be modified to a very interesting question (at least as far as big-list type questions go). Can people name examples of fields of mat …

It seems to me that almost all conjectures (hypotheses) that were widely believed by mathematicians to be true were proved true later, if they ever got proved. Are there any notab …

Currently in my undergraduate courses I am being taught how to set up various machinery using slick, short proofs and then how to apply that machinery. What I am not being taught, …

Does anyone have a clue where the "h" came from?