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Not only do we not know the date, we don't even know whether he wrote the remark at all. For all we know it might have been invented by his son Samuel, who published his father's comments. In his le …

William Sealy Gosset published a result under the pseudonym Student. (Because his employer, the Guinness brewing company, did not allow their employees to publish for fear of divulging trade secrets. …

When Kummer started working on research problems,he tried to solve what became known as "Kummer's problem", i.e., the determination cubic Gauss sums (its cube is easy to compute). Kummer asked Dirichl …

Martin Mattmüller, in his article Leonhard Euler, seine Heimatstadt und ihre Universität on Euler's hometown Basel, writes that this public talk (not a dissertation or written thesis), which Euler gav …

I don't think that there's a good answer to this. The following episode at least shows that people have been thinking about the problem of capitalizing Abelian for quite a while. In her letter to Has …

A beautiful survey article on the Italian school, with a discussion of several errors of all kinds by Severi, can be found in The Legacy of Niels Henrik Abel (Oslo 2002), Springer-Verlag 2004: Brig …

"Proof by example" is a technique used by Euclid, who often proved results that hold e.g. for n integers in a typical case, say for 3 integers, as well as by Diophantus, who had to choose values for h …

In absence of any evidence (she has collected works, and there are various people who have studied her biography) this is nonsense. In addition, this would not at all be compatible with Emmy Noether's …

Fermat did not prove this result; he claimed that the only solution is the obvious one and conjectured (in words that seem to suggest he knew how to prove it, but without explicitly saying so) that th …

There are many introductions to number theory, but few are as original (my term for what others would call weird) as Fueter's "Synthetische Zahlentheorie" published in 1925. It starts with elementary …

In 1801, Gauss certainly was aware of the general procedure to obtain the class number formula (or asymptotic results) via counting lattice points. As a matter of fact, the approach using lattice poin …

In a letter to Gauss, on January 3, 1840 (Werke II), Dirichlet stated the unit theorem in the same version as he would later publish it, along with the comment that the proof was very easy and could b …

Furtwängler proved the principal ideal theorem when he was almost 60. No small feat given that Artin and Schreier simultaneously were working on it.

This story is apocryphal. In my review of Dauben's article The battle for Cantorian set theory, I wrote that Dauben repeats the well known claim that Kronecker, in a lecture at the Berliner Naturforsc …

Let V be the vertex of a parabola, F its focus, X a point on its symmetry axis, and A a point on the parabola such that AX is orthogonal to VX. It was well within the power of the Greeks to prove rela …