Timeline for Mathematical "urban legends"
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 15, 2011 at 1:21 | comment | added | 36min | Russian math education is solid! even Gang leader know Taylor remainders... | |
| Jan 31, 2011 at 18:06 | comment | added | Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine | @Yemon: what makes you so sure that gang leaders today don’t know it? | |
| Jan 25, 2011 at 21:13 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | For some reason I feel slightly wistful for a world (or a time) where gang leaders even knew there was such a thing as the Taylor Remainder Theorem ... | |
| Jan 25, 2011 at 18:47 | comment | added | Harun Šiljak | According to Gamow, it was Tamm (references: books.google.com/… and springerlink.com/content/w0934gm403641227 ) | |
| Jan 25, 2011 at 18:10 | comment | added | Alex R. | I think a variant of the story asked for a derivation of the quadratic formula. Perhaps there should be a followup question of what one is expected to derive in their sleep... | |
| Jan 25, 2011 at 17:45 | comment | added | Deane Yang | So that's why when I was a first year graduate student at Harvard, the question "state and prove Taylor's theorem" appeared on the written qualifying exam! I think the professor who put this on the exam (we all thought it was Andy Gleason) was skeptical about whether the graduate students knew freshman calculus properly. As it happens, I knew how to do this only because I had been teaching freshman calculus that semester. Otherwise, I would have had to do some sweating, too. | |
| Jan 25, 2011 at 16:37 | history | answered | Alex R. | CC BY-SA 2.5 |