Timeline for (Obscure) areas of mathematics that are largely inactive or forgotten today? [duplicate]
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
28 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 2, 2023 at 20:22 | history | left closed in review |
Alex M. Daniele Tampieri Friedrich Knop |
Original close reason(s) were not resolved | |
| Jul 30, 2023 at 1:34 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | @arsmath, you could post to meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/223/… | |
| Jul 29, 2023 at 17:02 | comment | added | arsmath | This question is obviously different from the question that it's supposedly a duplicate of, so I'm voting to reopen. Overly aggressive closing of questions that aren't really duplicates has ruined Stack Overflow, and I don't want to see the same thing happen here. | |
| Jul 29, 2023 at 17:00 | review | Reopen votes | |||
| Aug 2, 2023 at 20:22 | |||||
| Jul 29, 2023 at 11:00 | history | closed |
Timothy Chow Benjamin Steinberg Ryan Budney David White Fernando Muro |
Duplicate of Do you know important theorems that remain unknown? | |
| Jul 24, 2023 at 19:41 | comment | added | Ira Gessel | Calculus of finite differences? (Part of it has been absorbed by numerical analysis; part by combinatorics.) | |
| Jul 24, 2023 at 6:22 | answer | added | Alexandre Eremenko | timeline score: 20 | |
| Jul 22, 2023 at 19:34 | comment | added | Somos | Does sangaku meet your criteria? | |
| Jul 22, 2023 at 15:19 | comment | added | Steven Landsburg | @TimothyChow : Yes, I had Muir in mind. I know it still gets cited, but I believe (though cannot prove) that it contains much that is essentially forgotten. | |
| Jul 22, 2023 at 12:22 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @StevenLandsburg You mean the sort of thing that's in Muir's Treatise on the Theory of Determinants? I've seen that book cited in modern literature, e.g., in Krattenthaler's Advanced determinant calculus. | |
| Jul 21, 2023 at 17:43 | comment | added | Steven Landsburg | Does the 19th century theory of determinants count? | |
| Jul 21, 2023 at 16:23 | comment | added | Benjamin Steinberg | Look at meta about the strike | |
| Jul 21, 2023 at 14:15 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @user7088941 "Inactive" is probably more promising than "unknown." If something is truly unknown then nobody reading this will know about it | |
| Jul 21, 2023 at 13:59 | comment | added | user7088941 | The link you provided contains a lot of nice mathematics, but unfortunately falls out of scope regarding my question. That MO question contains rather known theorems but whose assumptions have been weakened (e.g. the Monotone Convergence Theorem, which is currently highest voted, that doesn't require monotonicity), or theorem from well-known areas of mathematics that were not known for quite a while (Zabreiko's lemma). I, on the other hand, am more interested in entire (niche) areas of mathematics that are unknown to this day. | |
| Jul 21, 2023 at 13:55 | comment | added | user7088941 | @BenjaminSteinberg What moderator strike is going on? Turning my question into a CW would be very good. | |
| Jul 21, 2023 at 12:21 | comment | added | Benjamin Steinberg | It seems due to the moderator strike big list questions like this can’t be changed to CW | |
| Jul 21, 2023 at 11:58 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | I'd suggest investigating the mathematics underlying obsolete technology or theories. For example, optimizing the programming of early electronic computers, developing a mechanical marine chronometer, Ptolemaic astronomy, the caloric theory of heat, etc. | |
| Jul 21, 2023 at 10:41 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | "All The Methods I Learned In My Mathematics Degree Became Obsolete In My Lifetime" huffpost.com/entry/… | |
| Jul 21, 2023 at 10:38 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | Aristotelian logic? See also math.stackexchange.com/questions/192626/… | |
| Jul 21, 2023 at 4:07 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jul 26, 2023 at 1:29 | |||||
| Jul 21, 2023 at 3:58 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | Spherical trigonometry was discussed in another MO question: Is spherical trigonometry a dead research area? | |
| Jul 21, 2023 at 0:46 | comment | added | LSpice | Re, I am reminded of the paradoxically titled question Do you know important theorems that remain unknown?. | |
| Jul 21, 2023 at 0:44 | history | edited | LSpice | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Capitalise title, proofreading, and alt text
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| Jul 20, 2023 at 23:42 | comment | added | user7088941 | @Gro-Tsen This could be a case of survival bias - since the only theories one still knows about today, are the ones that were fruitful enough to ascend to higher generality and therefore are remembered. Those unfruitful theories were erased from the memories of most. (But screw theory -funny name- is an example that could come close to what I'm interested in, but it is not obscure enough, the language doesn't seem to really have change significantly; and it is definitely not forgotten: golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2019/10/screw_theory.html) | |
| Jul 20, 2023 at 22:30 | comment | added | Gro-Tsen | Joke aside, what often happens is that either the branch gets subsumed under a more general branch or language, or else it is no longer under active research because it is believed that there are no longer any truly interesting results to discover. But even in those cases, they never disappear into oblivion. Even, say, descriptive geometry and screw theory aren't entirely forgotten by mathematicians (and certainly not entirely forgotten by other people). | |
| Jul 20, 2023 at 22:25 | comment | added | Gro-Tsen | Branches of mathematics don't die, they just ascend to higher generality. 😄 | |
| S Jul 20, 2023 at 21:32 | review | First questions | |||
| Jul 20, 2023 at 22:01 | |||||
| S Jul 20, 2023 at 21:32 | history | asked | user7088941 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |