Timeline for Small ideas that became big
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 22, 2020 at 11:11 | comment | added | Pietro Majer | I'd say giving a name to numbers, as abstract objects, and listing them, was already advanced mathematics. Maybe even before that, it appeared the idea of bijection e.g. fingers $\leftrightarrow$ goats, opening the the way to a whole mathematical world. | |
| Aug 26, 2020 at 1:58 | comment | added | Sophie Swett | I'm sure that numbers were "not looking very useful" early on. Somebody came up with a collection of words that can be used to determine whether one multitude is more numerous, equally numerous, or less numerous than another multitude. Well, gee, who spends so much time comparing multitudes that they need special words in order to do it? Useful, perhaps, but obviously not nearly as useful as knowing how to make a knife. | |
| Aug 17, 2020 at 20:21 | comment | added | LSpice | @AmirSagiv, whether or not it's what @Hvjurthuk had in mind, this certainly doesn't seem like an attempt at a new question. | |
| Aug 17, 2020 at 19:12 | history | edited | Michael Hardy | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 4 characters in body
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| Aug 16, 2020 at 19:50 | comment | added | Nate Eldredge | Obligatory: smbc-comics.com/comic/a-new-method | |
| Aug 15, 2020 at 17:23 | comment | added | Hvjurthuk | @MichaelHardy Okay, you went too far in (pre)history (even in biology itself). I am mostly interested in more modern things. However this answer is in the line of the famous quotation of Grothendieck about simple ideas. Legit though then. | |
| Aug 15, 2020 at 16:57 | review | Low quality posts | |||
| Aug 15, 2020 at 17:13 | |||||
| Aug 15, 2020 at 16:52 | comment | added | Michael Hardy | @FrancescoPolizzi : Perhaps not, but no one at the time could have anticipated the life of that idea. | |
| Aug 15, 2020 at 16:51 | comment | added | Francesco Polizzi | Do you think that this discovery was "something very obscure and not looking very useful"? | |
| S Aug 15, 2020 at 16:37 | history | answered | Michael Hardy | CC BY-SA 4.0 | |
| S Aug 15, 2020 at 16:37 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Michael Hardy |