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

80 votes

In "splendid isolation"

Cormack and Hounsfield received the 1979 Nobel prize in medicine for their work on CT scans. Cormack, a physicist, published his mathematical work on this in 1963, to essentially no response. Hounsfie …
19 votes

Have the tides ever turned twice on any open problem?

I think the Busemann-Petty problem is an example like what you're asking, although changes in opinion would be due to progress (positive and negative) rather than any heuristic analysis. A great de …
33 votes
Accepted

history of quaternion algebras

In the early 1900s, Dickson introduced what he called generalized quaternion algebras over any field $K$ of characteristic not 2. These are exactly what we'd call quaternion algebras over $K$. His def …
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24 votes
Accepted

History of the analytic class number formula

Do you insist that the formula be interpreted as the value of a residue, hence requiring that it be known that the zeta-function of every number field is meromorphic around $s = 1$? It goes back to De …
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10 votes
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"Epicycles" (Ptolemy style) in math theory?

Euler found values of the Riemann zeta-function by artful manipulations of divergent series, e.g., interpreting a function that's $(-1)^{n/2}$ at even $n > 0$ and $0$ at odd $n > 0$ as $\cos(\pi n/2)$ …
17 votes

History of the Frobenius Endomorphism?

Since you reach back to Euler, who proved Fermat's little theorem in the form $a^p \equiv a \bmod p$ by using induction on $a$ and the binomial theorem, I think your "Frobenius endomorphism" is the $p …
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16 votes

Newton and Newton polygon

here are some references: "Plane Algebraic Curves" by Brieskorn and Knorrer, around page 370. "Plane Algebraic Curves" by Fischer, Appendix 4. The link https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pd …
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14 votes
Accepted

History of the Normal Basis Theorem

The cached page http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:q5q43iNq1SQJ:siba2.unile.it/ese/issues/1/690/Notematv27n1p5.ps+normal+basis+theorem&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari gives …
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22 votes

Notable mathematics during World War II

Eilenberg and Mac Lane's papers on category theory started appearing: "Natural Isomorphisms in Group Theory" in the Proc. National Acad. Sci. USA in 1942 and "General Theory of Natural Equivalences" i …
35 votes

Fields of mathematics that were dormant for a long time until someone revitalized them

Modular forms were actively studied by number theorists Hecke and Siegel in the 1930s, but it was not widely appreciated. Around the same time Hardy, in a series of lectures on Ramanujan's work deliv …
22 votes

Origins of names of algebraic structures

Ring came from Zahlring, which was Hilbert's term for what we would essentially call a ring of algebraic integers. Dedekind earlier used the term ordnung (= order, taken from the Linnean classificati …
14 votes
Accepted

History of "natural transformations"

See Whitney's paper from 1935 where he defined tensor products of abelian groups. There you will find the terms natural homomorphism and (especially) natural isomorphism. Whitney makes no attempt to g …
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16 votes
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An Euler-proof that cannot be repaired?

This result of Euler is the last theorem in http://eulerarchive.maa.org/docs/originals/E072.pdf, and if you prefer English to Latin look at the last theorem in http://eulerarchive.maa.org/docs/transla …
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21 votes

Origins of functional field arithmetic

Maybe there are some perceptions of the analogy in the work of Gauss, but for certain the close relation between Z and F[x] where F is a finite field was established in 1857 in a paper of Dedekind, wh …
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15 votes

What would you want to see at the Museum of Mathematics?

There are many interesting films at the site http://www.etudes.ru/ (not in English): curves of constant width, Pick's theorem, geometry of polyhedra, an infinite staircase with the harmonic series, me …

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