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I believe that the closest analogues to your physical examples arise when mathematical texts are, at the time they are written, regarded as being precise, but are later regarded as being insufficientl …

Google Books provides partial answers to these questions. If we allow ourselves the freedom to consider not just the phrase "Diophantine equation" but also the phrase "Diophantine problem" then it wa …

Persi Diaconis left home at 14 to work with Dai Vernon as a magician. Trying to protect himself from being cheated in dishonest casinos, he was led to Feller's textbook on probability theory, which he …

There is a more general question lurking in the background, which is what do critics of logical foundations generally think about applications? Historically, intuitionism is not the only foundational …

Thanks to Sofie Verbeek for the answer. The reference is Erratum to "Galois Representations and Modular Forms" by Kenneth A. Ribet, Bulletin (New Series) of the American Mathematical Society 33 ( …

W. S. Massey gives a rather detailed account in his essay, "A history of cohomology theory" (in History of Topology, edited by I. M. James, North Holland, 2006). The initial idea was due to Alexander …

I'm not sure if you're insisting on examples in which a mathematician (or group of mathematicians) works single-mindedly on a single problem for many years and finally conquers the problem. If so, th …

I asked Ron Rivest, and he replied: Yes, I coined the term "smooth number" to refer to a number that has only small prime factors.  I don't recall now much about the  thinking process, except …

There does not seem to be a direct mathematical analogue of Alfven. Nobody who has won a Fields Medal or an Abel Prize has made well-publicized complaints about how they have had an unduly difficult …

This might not be exactly what you're asking for but I think it's close: Manjul Bhargava's generalizations of Gauss's composition law to higher composition laws. While Gauss's composition law did not …

As Jim Humphreys has suggested in the comments, practically all of Gian-Carlo Rota's career could be described as breathing new life into unjustly neglected subjects: Möbius functions of posets, invar …

The excellent answers by Carlo Beenakker and Padraig Ó Catháin have inspired me to do some reading, and I have come to the understanding that the contrast between English and Continental mathematics a …

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 …

Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition says only this: Needless to say, all the Mock Turtle's subjects are puns (reading, writing, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division …

Given a homogeneous polynomial ideal, we can ask how many linearly independent homogeneous polynomials of each degree there are, and thereby obtain a sequence of integers. In a 1927 paper, Macaulay a …