Timeline for Experimental mathematics leading to major advances
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 14, 2010 at 19:11 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki | ||
| Mar 11, 2010 at 20:46 | vote | accept | Gil Kalai | ||
| Mar 11, 2010 at 20:46 | history | bounty ended | Gil Kalai | ||
| Mar 11, 2010 at 17:09 | comment | added | Tomaž Pisanski | I would like to mention two "computers" of the 18th century. The first one is Anton Felkel who produced a table of primes in 1776. In scs.uiuc.edu/~mainzv/exhibitmath/exhibit/felkel.htm one can read that the Austrian artillery used his output in battles : just the paper, not numbers! In 1849 Gauss mentions in his 4 page letter to his student JF Encke that he used Vega's tables to confirm his estimate. Jurij Vega published his table of primes in 1797. Who knows if Felkel's tables were used for cartridges in 1789 when Vega commanded a battery of mortars at the battle for Belgrade. | |
| Jan 18, 2010 at 21:28 | comment | added | Douglas Zare | You get 1/p as a/(q^n-1) so p is a factor of q^n-1, and the multiplicative order of q is n mod p. If (p-1)/n is even, q is a quadratic residue. | |
| Jan 18, 2010 at 20:48 | comment | added | Michael Lugo | Qiaochu, how would doing those expansions have helped? | |
| Jan 18, 2010 at 17:17 | history | edited | Mariano Suárez-Álvarez | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
edited body
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| Jan 18, 2010 at 16:29 | comment | added | Harrison Brown | Considering Euler died when Gauss was seven or eight, I'd think that in some sense it's very likely Euler predated Gauss. (I don't know if Euler published his conjectured statement, though.) | |
| Jan 18, 2010 at 16:26 | comment | added | Mariano Suárez-Álvarez | (special cases of reciprocity, that is!) | |
| Jan 18, 2010 at 16:13 | comment | added | Mariano Suárez-Álvarez | He must have learned special cases from Fermat, and Euler had the general statement (but not the proof) (I am not sure Euler predated Gauss here, though) | |
| Jan 18, 2010 at 15:58 | comment | added | Qiaochu Yuan | This may be apocryphal, but I remember being told that Gauss also conjectured and proved quadratic reciprocity after expanding 1/p in base q for various pairs of primes p, q. | |
| Jan 18, 2010 at 15:49 | history | answered | Mariano Suárez-Álvarez | CC BY-SA 2.5 |