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History and philosophy of mathematics, biographies of mathematicians, mathematics education, recreational mathematics, communication of mathematics.

10 votes

When did coordinate plane "as we know it" come into play?

One landmark could be the 1693 paper "An Instance of the Excellence of the Modern ALGEBRA, in the Resolution of the Problem of finding the Foci of Optick Glasses universally"(alt. link), where Edmond …
Francois Ziegler's user avatar
27 votes
Accepted

Oldest photographed mathematician

Most ancient: Wikipedia has a daguerreotype of Gauss (1777–1855) on his deathbed. Or possibly Farkas Bolyai (1775–1856) in what look like similar circumstances. Less ancient, but allegedly photographe …
Francois Ziegler's user avatar
111 votes
Accepted

History of "without loss of generality"

I think one reason JSTOR doesn't have “loss of generality” before 1831 is that fewer scientists wrote in English. But one finds (with minor variants merged, translations *starred, and year first publi …
Francois Ziegler's user avatar
32 votes

Have the tides ever turned twice on any open problem?

$P=$ Calabi’s conjecture. Specifically, the link says “By the late 1960s, many were doubtful of the Calabi conjecture”, then Yau did “produce a "counterexample" to the conjecture. The "counterexample" …
4 votes

Have the tides ever turned twice on any open problem?

$P=$ Carleson’s theorem, from his Abel interview: Abel first thought that he had solved the general quintic by radicals. Then he found a mistake and subsequently he proved that it was impossible t …
12 votes

Reference for Diagonalization Trick

From this, it sounds like a very early instance is in Ascoli's proof of his theorem: pp. 545-549 of Le curve limite di una varietà data di curve, Atti Accad. Lincei 18 (1884) 521-586. (Which, alas, I …
Francois Ziegler's user avatar
4 votes

Where can I find a translation of Caspar Wessel's "Om directionens analytiske betegning?"

The book is volume 46, no. 1 of the Danish Academy’s Matematisk-fysiske Meddelelser, and as such is freely available in pdf at University of Southern Denmark. (The Bibliothèque Nationale also has a …
Francois Ziegler's user avatar
15 votes

Tweetable Mathematics

Of course, every finite group of odd order is solvable.
12 votes
Accepted

What is the name of the following theorem: dimension of complex irreducible representation d...

Georg Frobenius, Über die Primfactoren der Gruppendeterminante, Sitzungsber. Akad. Berlin (1896) 1343-1382. The theorem is announced at the beginning, p. 1344: Der Grad $f$ ist ein Divisor der Ord …
Francois Ziegler's user avatar
9 votes

history of calculus of several variables

To Carlo Beenakker's references about total differentials (which came first), one might add a word about Alexis Fontaine, inventor of the notation (notion?) of partial derivative: Fontaine, Alexis L …
Francois Ziegler's user avatar
13 votes

complex fourier coefficients, introduced by?

I believe the answer to the question in the title is probably Cauchy, who in Méthode simple et générale pour la détermination numérique des coefficients que renferme le développement de la fonction pe …
Francois Ziegler's user avatar
12 votes
Accepted

History of the kernel of a homomorphism?

The word at least, seems to originate with Pontryagin (1931, p. 186): 28) Wenn eine Gruppe $A$ auf eine Gruppe $B$ homomorph abgebildet ist, so heißt die Untergruppe von $A$, die aus allen Element …
Francois Ziegler's user avatar
7 votes

Telling right from left

I don’t know about wrong results, but compare Godement’s Algèbre (1966, and still 1980): on dit que l’ensemble $x\mathrm H$ est une classe à droite modulo $\mathrm H$ (translation: “we say tha …
14 votes
Accepted

History of the Frobenius Endomorphism?

This is traced in Hasse (1967) and Hawkins (2013), who writes on p. 326: According to Miyake (1989, p. 347), Hasse introduced the term “Frobenius substitution” in (1926-1930), apparently unaware …
Francois Ziegler's user avatar
4 votes

First reference to the term "Weierstrass equation" in elliptic curves

This must come from the name Weierstrass normal form given to the elliptic integrals $$ \int\frac{ds}{\sqrt{4s^3-g_2s-g_3}},\quad \int\frac{s\,ds}{\sqrt{4s^3-g_2s-g_3}},\quad \int\frac{ds}{(s-\alpha)\ …
Francois Ziegler's user avatar

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