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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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …