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

3 votes

Feit-Thompson theorem: the Odd order paper

The Wikipedia article Odd order theorem is worth reading.
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
28 votes
Accepted

Origin of terms "flag", "flag manifold", "flag variety"?

Armand Borel's Bourbaki Seminar 121 Groupes algébriques is from 1955, and uses "drapeau" (page 7). (It's online at archive.numdam.org.) This may not be the earliest occurrence, but there is a good rea …
j.c.'s user avatar
  • 13.6k
14 votes

What is the situation with Hilbert's Fifth Problem?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_fifth_problem is a decent survey. In general in the discussion of "status" of the Hilbert problems, there are at least two recognisable routes. Route A is the …
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
29 votes
3 answers
4k views

Galois theory timeline

A recent question on the history of Galois theory wasn't the most satisfactory. But the historical issues do seem quite attractive. They relate to innovation, and to exposition. There is a perspective …
2 votes

What was Galois theory like before Emil Artin?

Post-Artin, you could read about it in English! No, that's not fair, but few authors writing in English on the "theory of equations" handled it. An exception would be L. E. Dickson, and I looked at on …
David Roberts's user avatar
  • 35.5k
1 vote

When did coordinate plane "as we know it" come into play?

It's an interesting question. Conservatism about negative numbers as such continued indeed into the early decades of the 19th century. But that was mainly a philosophical position. Pedagogic conservat …
Charles Matthews's user avatar
0 votes

Why might André Weil have named Carl Ludwig Siegel the greatest mathematician of the 20th ce...

For Weil, the Mordell-Weil theorem; for Siegel, the theorem on integral points on curves (genus at least 1). Think about the use of abelian varieties here. Mordell-Weil is sort of about making Mordell …
Matheus's user avatar
  • 1,675
2 votes

Who named it the Snake Lemma?

If you Google for "diagramme du serpent" it becomes plausible that it was a diagram in Cartan-Eilenberg first of all, before a lemma. Interesting example of how Bourbaki became the standard grad stude …
Charles Matthews's user avatar
3 votes

Heuristics for the Hodge Conjecture

Edited: One point is that Hodge's original version of the conjecture was wrong, and in a couple of ways. You do need rational coefficients (integral is too much to ask for, see ref below). Also a mor …
Charles Matthews's user avatar
17 votes

When have we lost a body of mathematics because errors were found?

I feel the answer is obviously "yes", and indeed that much of 19th century mathematics was lost, in a serious sense, for much of the 20th century. I was struck recently by discovering that Henry Fox T …
Charles Matthews's user avatar
26 votes

Gauss's views on pure mathematics

Quotation from Gauss: "...the greatest thing is purely mathematical thinking: this is worth much more than the application of mathematics." In conversation in 1854, a few months before his death, th …
Charles Matthews's user avatar
11 votes

Grothendieck on topological vector spaces

It seems clear enough to me that Grothendieck was (perhaps is) sui generis as a mathematician, something that can be said of a few other mathematicians in each of the 19th and 20th centuries (e.g. Ram …
Charles Matthews's user avatar
3 votes

The historical development of automorphic geometry

Interesting take, but a bit hard to make into proper history, I should think. Start with the idea that, post-Gauss, 19th century mathematics was mainly not about number theory. This could be hard to …
Charles Matthews's user avatar
8 votes

In what ways did Leibniz's philosophy foresee modern mathematics?

My version, quickly, would be that he envisaged "points" that were abstractions. Whence "logical space" as came in first around 1900 (long discussion) as implied by Boolean algebra, which he also anti …
Charles Matthews's user avatar
36 votes
2 answers
4k views

Timeline of cohomology (1935 to 1938)

There was a recent question on intuitions about sheaf cohomology, and I answered in part by suggesting the "genetic" approach (how did cohomology in general arise?). For historical material specific t …

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