Timeline for What are some examples of narrowly missed discoveries in the history of mathematics?
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12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 18, 2017 at 20:25 | comment | added | Jules | Actually, you don't even need Maxwell's equations. Using only the principle of relativity you can deduce the form of the Lorentz transformation with some unknown parameter c with units of speed. The Galilean transformation has $c=\infty$, the Lorentz transformation has c = 3*10^8 m/s. | |
| Apr 8, 2012 at 7:02 | comment | added | Kerry | Lorentz derived the first (and maybe the second) order derivation of special relativity, I think Einstein derived the transformation to all orders. | |
| Jun 20, 2010 at 19:58 | comment | added | jeremy | Late to the party, but I believe Lorentz's equations were developed by Lorentz in a slightly different context than Einstein, and ended up not quite being correct despite being the correct transform equations of SR (more than just the time thing Yuan cites above). So even if Einstein had known about them, he may not've needed to cite them since they were neither correct nor were they doing the same thing as what he was doing. And regarding what Victor commented, this is why there was a lot of mathematical work to do after Einstein in this area. | |
| Jun 20, 2010 at 16:09 | comment | added | Victor Protsak | And let's not forget Minkowski in connection with special relativity. As for representation theory of the Poincare and Galilean group, that's wishful thinking in the extreme: the conceptual development of representation theory to the point that we can compare them took a lot of highly nontrivial effort, even if we tend to forget it nowadays. | |
| Apr 4, 2010 at 6:32 | vote | accept | Shizhuo Zhang | ||
| Mar 26, 2010 at 13:46 | comment | added | Mark Meckes | Did he lift those results, or rediscover them independently? They're not obvious but not that deep either. | |
| Mar 26, 2010 at 0:33 | comment | added | Harry Gindi | Yes, but the point is that Einstein basically had no mathematical work left to do, but he did not cite any of the results that he basically lifted from Lorentz and Poincaré. | |
| Mar 25, 2010 at 23:52 | comment | added | Qiaochu Yuan | My understanding is that Lorentz did not understand the point of the formal time parameter he introduced. He regarded it as a computational convenience, whereas Einstein's contribution was to think of it as "real" time. | |
| Mar 25, 2010 at 22:23 | comment | added | Harry Gindi | Yes, there is an ongoing dispute over whether or not Einstein really deserves priority on that one. Lorentz published the Lorentz equations years before Einstein published the SRT. | |
| Mar 25, 2010 at 21:36 | comment | added | Ben Wieland | Poincare published in 1905, just like Einstein. | |
| Mar 25, 2010 at 20:07 | comment | added | Johannes Hahn | I always thought that Poincare did discover special relativity years before Einstein. His discovery just wasn't noticed our understood well enough. | |
| Mar 25, 2010 at 17:37 | history | answered | Qiaochu Yuan | CC BY-SA 2.5 |