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I am aware of some of the history of the gamma function $\Gamma(z)$, partly through a 2009(!) MO question "Who invented the gamma function?"—Euler, Bernoulli, etc. My question does not seem to be answ …

Thales (circa 600BC—roughly 50 years before Pythagoras, 200 years before Plato, and 300 years before Euclid) certainly knew and reasoned with the concept of a planar angle. Are there earlier historica …

The ancient Babylonians understood squares:       Plimpton 322 The ancient Athenians understood cubes, if we can take doubling the cube, i.e., the Delian problem, as evidence. My question is: Q. …

We are all familiar with Wigner's "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" thesis (1), and of Hardy's opinion that "the great bulk of higher mathematics is useless" (2). I am wondering if there are …

"Adleman refers to integers which factor completely into small primes as “smooth” numbers." (ME Hellman, JM Reyneri. Advances in Cryptology, 1983: citation link.) Does anyone know what is the int …

Yitang Zhang's Annals of Mathematics primes-gap result opened a new window, which Polymath's reduction from $70\times 10^6$ to $246$ attests. Perhaps Harald Helfgott's celebrated proof of the odd Gol …

This is a simple bibliographic request that I have been unable to pin down. Max Dehn's solution to Hilbert's 3rd problem is: Max Dehn, "Über den Rauminhalt." Mathematische Annalen 55 (190x), no. 3, …

Archimedes (ca. 287-212BC) described what are now known as the 13 Archimedean solids in a lost work, later mentioned by Pappus. But it awaited Kepler (1619) for the 13 semiregular polyhedra to be rec …

I wonder if the convention of labeling points in geometric diagrams with uppercase symbols ultimately derives from Greek mathematics, which was originally written in "majuscule" (uppercase) Greek scr …

My understanding (from a talk by Rob Bradley) is that Cauchy is responsible for the now-standard $\varepsilon{-}\delta$ formulation of calculus, introduced in his 1821 Cours d’analyse. Although perha …

It may be that certain theorems, when proved true, counterintuitively retard progress in certain domains. Lloyd Trefethen provides two examples: Faber's Theorem on polynomial interpolation: Interpre …

John Horton Conway is known for many achievements: Life, the three sporadic groups in the "Conway constellation," surreal numbers, his "Look-and-Say" sequence analysis, the Conway-Schneeberger $15$-th …

Q. When did the notion of homeomorphism reach its modern formulation as a bicontinuous bijection, i.e., a continuous bijection between topological spaces whose inverse is also continuous? …

Landau's four problems are now over a century old (1912), and each still unsolved. This seems remarkable, even though he was not the originating author all four (maybe only the 4th?). Still, he isolat …

Does anyone know when and why the Fraktur script was introduced for Lie and other algebras—$\mathfrak{g}$, $\mathfrak{gl}_n$, $X/\mathfrak{g}$, $\mathfrak{g}\oplus\mathfrak{g}$, $\mathfrak{su}$, $\mat …