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The article is probably referring to Dedekind's Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen of 1888, in which point 64 is Dedekind's definition of infinite. This of course is after Cantor had been investigatin …

I would say that a lot of topology was discrete before it was continuous. The Euler characteristic was first observed (in 1752) as an invariant of polyhedra. Around 1900 Poincaré first calculated Bet …

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.

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' …

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've hesitated to attempt an answer to this question because I do not know about shape parameters. However, in the hope that what is really wanted is a history of the cross-ratio, here goes. The cro …

All mathematicians are used to thinking that certain theorems are deep, and we would probably all point to examples such as Dirichlet's theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions, the prime number t …

I'll attempt an answer to question 1. Hausdorff was entitled to think that set theory was not yet mature, because his own 1914 book made considerable advances on what had been done previously (notably …

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 …

Here are a few: Girolamo Cardano: The Book of My Life. (trans. by Jean Stoner. New York: New York Review of Books, 2002) Norbert Wiener's two volumes Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth. (MIT Press 195 …

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 …

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 …

The Australian writer Clive James, after several decades of experience, came to the conclusion that "Writing is essentially a matter of saying things in the right order" (see his Unreliable Memoirs, p …

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 …

Here are a few examples from the 19th century. Unsolvability of the quintic equation. Abel (1826) proved this by algebraic ingenuity, but without clarifying the concepts involved. Galois (1830) gave …