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The “Earliest Uses” site suggests that the expression “uniform distribution” first appeared in Uspensky (1937), and “uniformly distributed” in Sakamoto (1943). Is that true?

Do we know what mathematician first considered, and perhaps named, what we call the group $\mathrm O(n)$, or $\mathrm{SO}(n)$, for some $n>3$? I mean it specifically as group (not Lie algebra) acting …

I am looking for the source and context of this quote, found e.g. at St Andrews: Only with the greatest difficulty is one able to follow the writings of any author preceding Euler, because it was …

Gödel had a cosmological model. Hamel, primarily a mechanician, gave any vector space a basis. Plücker, best known for line geometry, spent years on magnetism. What other mathematicians had so distant …

Today this is common, but how exactly did it start? I am looking for examples in various languages, and suggest: Exclude Latin (as more “ancient” or “international” than “foreign”) Exclude French af …

Today the word form can refer to (at least) three different kinds of mathematical object: A homogeneous polynomial. This was apparently started by Gauss (1801), renaming what others had called formu …

Today homomorphism (resp. isomorphism) means what Jordan (1870) had called isomorphism (resp. holoedric isomorphism). How did the switch happen? “Homomorphic” (and “homomorphism” as “property of being …

Let $\theta = \tan^{-1}(t)$. Nowadays it is taught: 1º that $$ \frac{d\theta}{dt} = \frac 1{dt\,/\,d\theta} = \frac 1{1+t^2}, \tag1 $$ 2º that, via the fundamental theorem of calculus, this is equival …

The Fourier transform of the volume form of the (n-1)-sphere in $\mathbf R^n$ is given by the well-known formula $$ \int_{S^{n-1}}e^{i\langle\mathbf a,\mathbf u\rangle}d\sigma(\mathbf u) = (2\pi)^{\nu …