Timeline for What great mathematics are we missing out on because of language barriers?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
8 events
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| Dec 19, 2021 at 13:32 | comment | added | user21820 | @JoséFigueroa-O'Farrill: How do we know that it was actually well-known to Russian mathematicians? If it had not even been published at that time, where is the evidence that your result wasn't simply stolen? | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 6:05 | comment | added | Brad Rodgers | @FrançoisG.Dorais, I realize it was almost a decade ago that you asked about that anecdote,,, but as far as I know the only paper of Selberg that was in Norwegian was his paper on what's now called the Selberg Integral. He published his result in a journal read mostly by high school teachers and his own claim is that he did this because he assumed the result was just a rediscovery. (Then again...) See arxiv.org/abs/0710.3981 for more, including the history. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 3:07 | comment | added | Steven Stadnicki | Another canonical example of this is the notion of NP completeness, which was developed independently in the Soviet Union roughly concurrently to or a couple of years before it was found in the west, depending on your particular timeline. | |
| Sep 11, 2015 at 9:01 | comment | added | Steve Jessop | "Those that are well-known to Russian mathematicians" sounds like an entry in Borges' fanciful taxonomy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… | |
| Apr 12, 2010 at 10:56 | comment | added | cheater | John and Jose, thank you - very revealing. This should kick off the right kind of answers. Jose, is there any telling what the theorem was? That would be fairly revealing of the state of what mathematicians in our language space are missing out on - and therefore good to have a look at! | |
| Apr 12, 2010 at 0:22 | comment | added | François G. Dorais | I was once told that Selberg published an important paper in Norwegian so that he would be able to milk the consequences before anybody else. Can anyone confirm this? | |
| Apr 12, 2010 at 0:15 | comment | added | José Figueroa-O'Farrill | I once got a paper rejected from a journal because "it was well known to Russian mathematicians", even though no published account of the result existed at the time! This contributed to my changing research interests at one point. | |
| Apr 11, 2010 at 23:17 | history | answered | John Stillwell | CC BY-SA 2.5 |