Timeline for Unrigorous British mathematics prior to G.H. Hardy
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
27 events
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| Sep 27, 2022 at 20:11 | comment | added | Tom Copeland | Klein contrasted the pragmatism of Gottingen mathematicians with the purism of Berlin mathematicians, so I don't think narratives drawing a sharp distinction between the mathematics of the isles and the continent are quite so rigorous. // You might enjoy scanning The Maxwellians by Hunt to sample some of the flavor of mathematics / natural philosophy / mathematical physics on the isles in the 1800's and note the disconnect with Hertz's investigations on the continent. | |
| Sep 27, 2022 at 19:42 | comment | added | Tom Copeland | (My previous comment was upvoted before I could edit it and move the original to Carlo's answer.) // Btw, Hardy was not averse to using heuristics such as exchanging integrals and infinite summations to get a handle on the meaning of a divergent expression. In one of his early papers, he explicitly advocates this, so I call it the Hardy heuristic. Suspect this is why he was able to recognize the ingenuity of Ramanujan. | |
| Sep 27, 2022 at 19:31 | comment | added | Tom Copeland | Where does Cayley (1821-95) fit in this narrative? and the Irish Hamilton (1805-1865)? | |
| May 17, 2022 at 22:08 | vote | accept | CommunityBot | moved from User.Id=216345 by developer User.Id=481663 | |
| May 17, 2022 at 21:41 | comment | added | Trunk | Strange Hilbert's name has not been mentioned by anyone although he was born some 15 years before Hardy and would be the embodiment of what many would see as German rigor. | |
| May 17, 2022 at 12:51 | history | edited | user44143 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
removed quotes around “unrigorous”, since that word does not appear in any of the quotes in the post, and switched to a more normal word order
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| May 17, 2022 at 11:38 | history | edited | Trunk | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Clarification to last sentence
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| May 14, 2022 at 17:01 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | Could you explain what does your last phrase mean? Specifically, what does it have to do with rigour? | |
| May 13, 2022 at 17:49 | answer | added | user44143 | timeline score: 8 | |
| May 13, 2022 at 17:01 | answer | added | David Chow | timeline score: 14 | |
| May 13, 2022 at 15:36 | comment | added | Firestone | ... There were also some difficult passages which he somehow simplified; but the essence carried over wonderfully. In a way, one could perhaps say the same thing about his skiing—a sport which, incidentally, his assistants were expected to have mastered, or else to learn from him. Never mind the details of the operations, he always managed to come down the mountain quite safely." | |
| May 13, 2022 at 15:35 | comment | added | Firestone | Regarding German rigor, the NAS Memoir of R. Courant tells how K. Friedrichs "described the excitement he felt when as a young student he read Courant’s presentation of geometric function theory in Hurwitz-Courant: It is true that there were some passages in which matters of rigor were taken somewhat lightly, but the essence came through marvelously. I was reminded of this effect much later, when I heard Courant play some Beethoven piano sonata.... | |
| May 13, 2022 at 15:17 | comment | added | shoover | Is there anything helpful at HSM.SE? | |
| May 13, 2022 at 14:27 | answer | added | Calvin Khor | timeline score: 9 | |
| May 12, 2022 at 20:53 | comment | added | Trunk | @H A Helfgott Little has changed in many textbooks - and that's despite the emergence of a 'new' profession since then, the scientific publisher's editor. | |
| May 12, 2022 at 19:51 | comment | added | H A Helfgott | I think Hardy himself gave some (really sad-looking) examples of English work on Fourier analysis in the 19th century. Unfortunately I can't remember the reference, but, going by memory, the examples suggested that, if anything, mentioning examples involving Cayley and Sylvester amounts to steelmanning 19th century English mathematics a little (whereas I suppose Hardy was doing the opposite). Also, textbooks were a mess; Littlewood gives an example in his miscellany on how it took a page not to define what a complex analytic function was. | |
| May 12, 2022 at 19:38 | history | edited | YCor | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
removed capitals from title
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| S May 12, 2022 at 18:03 | history | suggested | J W |
Added history tag
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| May 12, 2022 at 15:39 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S May 12, 2022 at 18:03 | |||||
| May 12, 2022 at 12:57 | answer | added | Timothy Chow | timeline score: 27 | |
| May 12, 2022 at 12:06 | review | Close votes | |||
| May 14, 2022 at 10:44 | |||||
| May 11, 2022 at 19:06 | history | became hot network question | |||
| May 11, 2022 at 11:31 | answer | added | Padraig Ó Catháin | timeline score: 27 | |
| May 11, 2022 at 11:29 | answer | added | Carlo Beenakker | timeline score: 33 | |
| May 11, 2022 at 11:12 | history | edited | Trunk | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Background intro added
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| S May 11, 2022 at 11:06 | review | First questions | |||
| May 11, 2022 at 11:31 | |||||
| S May 11, 2022 at 11:06 | history | asked | Trunk | CC BY-SA 4.0 |