Timeline for When has discrete understanding preceded continuous?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 13, 2022 at 21:33 | comment | added | Tom Copeland | "Joseph Fourier’s first model of heat diffusion, which led to his series, marked the origin of infinite matrix theory, a topic which did not really develop until the late nineteenth century, closely driven by functional analysis and integral equations. In this context the name “spectral theory” has its origins." -- From the Rise of the Group Concept to the Stormy Onset of Group Theory in the New Quantum Mechanics by Bonolis. | |
| Apr 1, 2021 at 2:40 | comment | added | Tom Copeland | The anecdote must have been Rota's. From a short bio of R by Kung: In the early 1960s, the start of his second period, Rota’s interest shifted to combinatorics, a subject he was fond of describing as “putting balls into boxes.” He became “one of the many who unknotted themselves from the tentacles of the Continuum and joined the then Rebel Army of the Discrete." | |
| Jul 21, 2020 at 6:57 | comment | added | Tom Copeland | Reading about Sylvester and Cayley and their interest in invariant theory, I just learned that determinants represented as two dimensional arrays of numbers/coefficients preceded the construction of matrices as computational devices encoding ways of multiplying arrays of numbers/variables/indeterminates. | |
| Mar 30, 2020 at 3:32 | comment | added | Tom Copeland | See also the discussion of Volterra's composition law on p. 34 of "Some highlights in the development of algebraic analysis" by Synowiec (eudml.org/doc/209068) that draws a similarv analogy between matrix multiplication and integrals. | |
| Jun 2, 2017 at 21:14 | history | edited | user44143 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 79 characters in body
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| May 29, 2017 at 19:03 | comment | added | Tom Copeland | @james.nixon, I'm reminded, on the other hand, of some anecdote (maybe by Rota or Arnold) of a researcher who dismissively said, "I do discrete not continuous." | |
| May 29, 2017 at 18:58 | comment | added | user78249 | I'm all for that... except when it involves matrices ;) | |
| May 29, 2017 at 18:57 | comment | added | Tom Copeland | @james.nixon, I think it is important for students wishing to become innovators (in any field) to appreciate the struggles/messiness of creation not just the beauty of the final product. | |
| May 29, 2017 at 18:38 | history | edited | Tom Copeland | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Added ref
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| May 29, 2017 at 18:25 | comment | added | user78249 | +1 even though I hate using the matrix representation, and hate when one has to digest a proof in terms of matrices. | |
| S May 29, 2017 at 18:15 | history | answered | Tom Copeland | CC BY-SA 3.0 | |
| S May 29, 2017 at 18:15 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Tom Copeland |