Search Results

The inverse Galois problem is another possible candidate, though it may not be easy to track down the earliest explicit statement of it. Wikipedia claims that it was posed in the early 19th century, b …

I suggested this candidate in a comment: For which $d$ and $g$ does there exist a curve in $\mathbb{P}^3$ of degree $d$ and genus $g$? In Hartshorne's Algebraic Geometry, Chapter VI, Section 6, it is …

The Navier–Stokes equation was mentioned in a comment so I thought I would give a link to Sylvio R. Bistafa's essay, 200 Years of the Navier-Stokes Equation, which gives some historical information. B …

A somewhat different type of example, not as early as the ones in Andrej Bauer's answer, but perhaps a bit more resistant to "moving the goalposts," is an ineffective result in number theory. For exam …

A trick is a mathematical life hack. A life hack is a simple but unexpected solution to a somewhat frequently occurring problem. So it is with a trick; it provides a simple and unexpected solution to …

I see several different ways of interpreting the question. The comic seems to be talking about mistakes (false starts, blind alleys, etc.) made along the way to a mathematical discovery. I think that …

De Bruijn sequences are so named because Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn enumerated them in 1946, but he later acknowledged the priority of C. Flye Sainte-Marie, who enumerated them already in 1894.

Suppose that $A$ is an oracle; then it is standard to write $\mathsf{P}^A$ for the complexity class $\mathsf{P}$ relativized to $A$. As I have mentioned elsewhere on MO, this is incredibly confusing …

I want to point out that you raised two questions, and in my opinion they are very different questions. So I really want to know how to decide whether a question is worth studying? How do I deci …

I'm not aware of anything exactly like what you have in mind, but here are a few things which might be close. They all take aim at the widespread belief that the intellectual development of mathemati …

Gödel's ontological proof requires a subtle assumption that if $\varphi$ is an essential property of $x$ then $x$ must possess $\varphi$. The first time that Gödel showed his proof to anyone was in 1 …

Igor Pak wrote an entertaining blog post on the topic of counterexamples, where he listed several of the conjectures mentioned here in the answers, as well as others, such as the general Burnside prob …

To elaborate on Somos's comment, David Gale wrote about The Strange and Surprising Saga of the Somos Sequences in the December 1991 "Mathematical Entertainments" column of the Mathematical Intelligenc …

There are several examples featuring Martin Gardner. R. B. Kershner's work on tiling the plane with convex pentagons would probably have been largely ignored (with his mistake remaining undiscovered …

I'm not sure why you expect there to be a crisp answer to such a broad question. The SEP article you cited demonstrates that, like most historical questions, the answer is messy and complicated. Your …