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These two studies arrive at what seems to be a more sensible conclusion: Age and Scientific Performance, Stephen Cole (1976). The long-standing belief that age is negatively associated with scien …

$P=NP$ Let me tick the list: Most likely false, because, as Scott Aaronson said "If $P = NP$, then the world would be a profoundly different place than we usually assume it to be." Yes, it's The Ope …

normalis already meant right-angled in classical Latin; for example, angulus normalis appears in the first century text De institutione oratoria (volume XI, paragraph 3.141) by Marcus Fabius Quintilia …

This must have been Heinrich Kornblum (1890-1914). [note by E. Landau in German, my translation] $^1$ The author, born in Wohlau on August 23, 1890, had before the war independently made the discover …

The first record I found of this photograph is in Oxford Figures: Eight Centuries of the Mathematical Sciences. Professor Michael Atiyah shares some recollections of J.H.C. Whitehead and his pigs: …

Constance Reid describes the recording on page 196 of her book Hilbert (1969). The recording was not made directly from the live address. Instead, Hilbert was asked to repeat the conclusion of his s …

The suffix "-oid" means the same as "quasi", so "resembling", "like". A groupoid is a quasi-group, like a group. There are hundreds of words in that category, covering many scientific disciplines. In …

I found this footnote on page 195 of Fricke and Klein's Vorlesungen über die Theorie der automorphen Functionen (1897): Translation: The term "homomorphic" seems more appropriate than the previously …

The True (?) Story of Hilbert's Infinite Hotel, by Helge Kragh (2014) What is known as "Hilbert's hotel" is a story of an imaginary hotel with infinitely many rooms that illustrates the bizarre conse …

Norman Alling's Conway's field of surreal numbers (1985) gives full credit to Conway: Conway introduced the Field No of numbers, which Knuth has called the surreal numbers. No is a proper class …

This history is described in Euler and the Zeta Function by Raymond Ayoub (1974). In his early twenties, around 1730, Euler considered the celebrated problem to calculate the sum $$\zeta(2)=\sum_{n=1} …

Photograph by Paul Halmos showing the artificial hands of Solomon Lefschetz [source] This quote [source] shows how Lefschetz overcame some limitations of his disability:

The reaction of Hilbert to Gödel is described in detail by Solomon Feferman in Gödel on finitism, constructivity and Hilbert’s program (2011). Hilbert was unaffected by any of the reconsiderations of …

there is no doubt the answer to your question is "no"; for a wonderful and scholarly recent book on the whole story, see Euler's Gem: The Polyhedron Formula and the Birth of Topology by David Richeson …

I would think this is from an authoritative source, since apparently the author consulted with Bourguignon (chair of the hiring committee at CNRS). When Grothendieck reapplied to the CNRS in 1984, …