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Results tagged with ho.history-overview
Search options questions only
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user 3106
History and philosophy of mathematics, biographies of mathematicians, mathematics education, recreational mathematics, communication of mathematics.
165
votes
23
answers
30k
views
Do you read the masters?
I often hear the advice, "Read the masters" (i.e., read old, classic texts by great mathematicians). But frankly, I have hardly ever followed it. What I am wondering is, is this a principle that peo …
125
votes
31
answers
16k
views
Papers that debunk common myths in the history of mathematics
What are some good papers that debunk common myths in the history of mathematics?
To give you an idea of what I'm looking for, here are some examples.
Tony Rothman, "Genius and biographers: The fictio …
114
votes
96
answers
16k
views
What would you want to see at the Museum of Mathematics? [closed]
EDIT (30 Nov 2012): MoMath is opening in a couple of weeks, so this seems like it might be a good time for any last-minute additions to this question before I vote to close my own question as "no long …
54
votes
3
answers
7k
views
Why are parabolic subgroups called "parabolic subgroups"?
Over the years, I have heard two different proposed answers to this question.
It has something to do with parabolic elements of $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$. This sounds plausible, but I haven't heard a reall …
- 82.7k
53
votes
9
answers
78k
views
What is the shortest Ph.D. thesis? [closed]
The question is self-explanatory, but I want to make some remarks in order to prevent the responses from going off into undesirable directions.
It seems that every few years I hear someone ask this qu …
51
votes
30
answers
8k
views
Taking a theorem as a definition and proving the original definition as a theorem
Gian-Carlo Rota's famous 1991 essay, "The pernicious influence of mathematics upon philosophy" contains the following passage:
Perform the following thought experiment. Suppose that you are given two …
40
votes
3
answers
7k
views
Timeline of "foundational" advances in homotopy theory?
As an interested outsider, I have been intrigued by the number of times that homotopy theory seems to have revamped its foundations over the past fifty years or so. Sometimes there seems to have been …
39
votes
5
answers
3k
views
Does there exist a comprehensive compilation of Erdos's open problems?
Fan Chung and Ron Graham's book Erdos on Graphs: His Legacy of Unsolved Problems (A. K. Peters, 1998) collects together all of Erdos's open problems in graph theory that they could find into a single …
- 82.7k
32
votes
1
answer
2k
views
Name of amateur who gave a new proof of the Ramanujan-Nagell theorem?
In an article by George Johnson in the New York Times back in 1999, it says that an amateur mathematician from India once sent Ian Stewart a proof of the Ramanujan-Nagell theorem that the Diophantine …
- 82.7k
32
votes
2
answers
2k
views
Wayback Machine for mathematics?
I have had a couple of experiences recently which have made me wonder whether the mathematics community should try to establish and maintain something like the Wayback Machine, but specifically focuse …
- 82.7k
32
votes
4
answers
5k
views
Is there an index for solutions to American Mathematical Monthly problems?
There is a lot of good stuff contained in the Problems section of the American Mathematical Monthly. One difficulty with extracting that information, however, is that if I see an old Monthly problem, …
- 82.7k
20
votes
1
answer
835
views
Young's natural representation of the symmetric group
The literature on the representation theory of the symmetric group contains some terminology that I find puzzling, and I am wondering if someone here knows the full story.
One of the standard ways to …
- 82.7k
20
votes
1
answer
2k
views
Is Van der Waerden's conjecture really due to Van der Waerden?
Van der Waerden's conjecture (now a theorem of Egorychev and Falikman) states that the permanent of a doubly stochastic matrix is at least $n!/n^n$.
The Wikipedia article, as well as many other sourc …
- 82.7k
17
votes
1
answer
891
views
List of problems that Erdős offered money for?
Is there a list somewhere of all the problems that Erdős offered cash awards for, including both solved and unsolved problems? One would think that the answer is yes, but so far I have had no luck fin …
- 82.7k
11
votes
1
answer
473
views
Yau's problem: Construct a triangle given a side, an angle, and an angle bisector
In Shing-Tung Yau's autobiography The Shape of a Life, he mentions a problem that he came up with as a teenager.
Suppose you know the length of one side of a triangle, one angle, and the length of …
- 82.7k