Skip to main content
Search type Search syntax
Tags [tag]
Exact "words here"
Author user:1234
user:me (yours)
Score score:3 (3+)
score:0 (none)
Answers answers:3 (3+)
answers:0 (none)
isaccepted:yes
hasaccepted:no
inquestion:1234
Views views:250
Code code:"if (foo != bar)"
Sections title:apples
body:"apples oranges"
URL url:"*.example.com"
Saves in:saves
Status closed:yes
duplicate:no
migrated:no
wiki:no
Types is:question
is:answer
Exclude -[tag]
-apples
For more details on advanced search visit our help page
Results tagged with
Search options answers only not deleted user 2384

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

13 votes
Accepted

Biography of Felix Hausdorff

There is the "Hausdorff edition" project (E. Brieskorn, F. Hirzebruch, W. Purkert, R. Remmert and E. Scholz) which will entail all collected works and is supposed to have a decent biography as well. O …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
23 votes
Accepted

Newton and Newton polygon

The Newton polygon and Newton's method are closely related. The following theorem was first proven by Puiseux: if $K$ is an algebraically closed field of characteristic zero, then the field of Pui …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
19 votes
Accepted

Motivation for strong law of large numbers

Here is a nice post of T. Tao on SLLN. In the comments section he is asked a very similar question to which he answers the following: (I hope it's ok to reproduce it here, since it is buried down in t …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
9 votes

Certain notations in Cayley's work

Some of the symbols used in that time would be tricky to type in Latex, so instead of writing an explanation here, I hope it is okay to just give a reference. There are two books by Florian Cajori, "A …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
8 votes
Accepted

Why were plane partitions invented?

MacMahon invented a technique which he called partition analysis to determine (multivariable) generating functions for many combinatorial objects and as a computational method for solving combinatoria …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
29 votes
Accepted

What is the origin of the term "spectrum" in mathematics?

Hilbert, in fact, got the term from Wilhelm Wirtinger (the first one to propose it according to, say http://www.mathphysics.com/opthy/OpHistory.html) the paper of Wirtinger is "Beiträge zu Riemann’s …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
22 votes
Accepted

What was Galois theory like before Emil Artin?

The development of Galois theory from Lagrange to Artin by B. Melvin Kiernan, is a history of pre-Artin Galois theory.
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
5 votes

Hall's treatment of algebraic operations

I haven't checked Hall's book so I'm not entirely sure that this is exactly what he talks about, but there are quite a few generalizations of groups by allowing multivalued operations. I mention some …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
16 votes
Accepted

Modular forms and "too many symmetries"

My interpretation of Mazur's quote was in terms of the history of the discovery of modular forms. Of course trigonometric functions came first, and then a whole variety of other special functions in t …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
16 votes
Accepted

What are hypergroups and hyperrings good for?

While I don't know much about hyperstructures other than hypergroups, I know it is hard to study the history behind them because of the non-consistent terminology attributed to these objects by differ …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
23 votes

A gamma function identity

A proof of the statement has already been given, so I will just add a small historical remark. The left hand side of your identity is the Veneziano amplitude in the case of four identical scalar parti …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
21 votes
Accepted

What's tropical about tropical algebra?

A lot of sources mention that the adjective "tropical" is given in honor of Imre Simon, but it seems hard to find who precisely coined the term. I found some sources which attribute this to some Frenc …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
43 votes

whence commutative diagrams?

An excerpt from Mac Lane's Categories for the Working Mathematician (p29, Notes on Chapter 1): The fundamental idea of representing a function by an arrow first appeared in topology about 1940, proba …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
4 votes

Birkhoff's theorem about doubly stochastic matrices

From Schneider's "The Birkhoff-Egervary-Konig theorem for matrices over lattice ordered abelian groups" after the following theorem is presented Let $G$ be a lattice ordered abelian group. Every g …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
25 votes
Accepted

Why are parabolic subgroups called "parabolic subgroups"?

It appears that neither of the answers is fully correct. There is a great book, "Essays in the history of Lie groups and algebraic groups" by Armand Borel, when it comes to references of this type. To …
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar

15 30 50 per page