Search Results

I don't think there is a decisive answer to this question, because some mathematicians accepted negative coordinates long before others did. However, here is another landmark from the 1690s: Huygens' …

In recent times it has been claimed that Bhaskara I (around 700) and more definitely Ibn al-Haytham (965 - 1040) were aware of Wilson's theorem. This is much earlier than Wilson's theorem was previous …

Franel was a number theorist who gave introductory calculus lectures in French at the ETH. Maybe the ETH offered courses in different languages, because of its location in a multilingual country. Does …

Gödel 's failure to discover unsolvability of the decision problems for predicate logic and Peano arithmetic may be an example. Gödel had all necessary tools: arithmetization, diagonalization, and a …

If you count any inversion of a power series as a predecessor of Lagrange inversion, then I believe the earliest examples are Newton's inversion of the log series to obtain the exponential series, and …

I am trying to find a copy of a picture "Mathematische Gesellschaft: Group Portrait, Faculty, University of Göttingen (1899)." This picture was published by Springer-Verlag as a poster in 1985, but …

As previous answers have pointed out, both the golden ratio and the Fibonacci numbers go back thousands of years. However, I believe the connection between the two was discovered around 1730. At that …

There is an English translation of the first 10 sections of Wessel's paper in the anthology edited by Henrietta Midonick, The Treasury of Mathematics, volume 2 (Penguin Books 1968) pp.321--329.

An earlier example than the Fermat primes is the class of primes of the form $2^n-1$, the so-called Mersenne primes. These occur in Euclid's theorem that $2^{n-1}(2^n-1)$ is perfect when $2^n-1$ is pr …

I imagine that Newton et al would have no trouble solving this teaser because they would say: let x be infinitesimal, in which case both numerator and denominator equal x-x; quotient equals 1 :)

The solution of the cubic equation by Scipione del Ferro and Tartaglia in the early 16th century. This was not only a great advance in algebra, but it also forced mathematicians to confront complex nu …

Cantor's diagonal argument first appears in his 1891 paper "Über eine elementare Frage der Mannigfaltigkeitslehre", Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 1: 75–78, in which he generali …

P. S. Novikov was 54 when he gave the first proof (143 pages!) of the unsolvability of the word problem for groups in 1955, and 58 when he co-solved the Burnside problem with S. I. Adian.

Since no one has mentioned A.N. Kolmogorov (born 1903), I hope I may be forgiven for a second answer. The following is from Kolmogorov's Wikipedia biography. In classical mechanics, he is best known …

Another point to consider is whether "Über den Rauminhalt" is in fact Dehn's first solution to Hilbert's 3rd Problem. I believe his first solution was in the paper "Über raumgleiche Polyeder" in the N …