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Aug 11, 2013 at 23:21 comment added Nate Eldredge Dumb question, but is it obvious that both are due to the same Reynolds? It's a common name...
Aug 11, 2013 at 15:52 answer added al-Hwarizmi timeline score: 1
Aug 11, 2013 at 14:04 comment added Abdelmalek Abdesselam ...2- constructing such an averaging or Haar integral for compact groups such as SO(n) and SU(n), 3- implementing this integration in a more algebraic way, e.g. as a differential operator involving Cayley's Omega operator, which is the analogue of expressing a Gaussian integral via the heat kernel. The funny thing is: 3 was used by Clebsch in 1861 to prove the FFT for SL(n), 2 was done by Hurwitz in 1897, while 1 i.e. Hilbert's proof which uses 3 goes back to 1890.
Aug 11, 2013 at 13:54 comment added Abdelmalek Abdesselam @Jim: Thanks. I don't have access now to a math library but from the few pages of Rota's article I could see on Google Books it seems that he might be responsible for this terminology. As per your earlier comment, indeed it is not so easy to reconstruct that history. It is a bit like doing archeological excavations. Also historical development does not follow the logical one. Namely, the logical order of things would seem to me to be: 1- realizing the usefulness of group averaging in invariant theory (eg as in Hibert's proof of finite generation), ...
Aug 11, 2013 at 13:34 comment added Jim Humphreys P.S. If you can track down the conference article by Rota listed in the references on Wikipedia, that might be helpful. Rota was deeply interested in both invariant theory and history, though he could be polemical at times.
Aug 11, 2013 at 13:29 comment added Jim Humphreys The history is probably hard to reconstruct in modern terms, given the early dates of papers in invariant theory. Anyway it does seem certain that Reynolds himself was working in other directions, as the incomplete Wikipedia article suggests: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_operator
Aug 11, 2013 at 13:17 history asked Abdelmalek Abdesselam CC BY-SA 3.0