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Mr John Pond, Esq. in the Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1806, part II, p431: "this quantity was very uniformly distributed though the intermediate arc". Rev. Baden Powell …

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't necessarily give the earliest uses of a word. But spline with the meaning "A long, narrow, and relatively thin piece or strip of wood, metal, etc.; a slat." is q …

One should note that in the pre-WWII period eugenics was not the dirty word that it became later. Actually it was a popular notion across the world, including in countries like the United States. The …

A lot of people counted Latin squares, going back to Euler (1782) and Cayley and Frolov (independently, 1890). Many of those who tried got the wrong answer. A summary is in this paper: B. D. McKay, …

Jan de Vries compiled a list of cubic graphs up to 10 vertices in the 19th century. His papers (in Dutch and French) are: J. de Vries. Over vlakke configuraties waarin elk punt met twee lijnen incid …

"But in dealing with given quantics, we may without loss of generality consider the covariant as a function of the like form with the quantic,..." — Arthur Cayley, An Introductory Memoir upon Quantics …

When something is defined as a binary relation, "pairwise" is strictly-speaking required in order to apply it to a set larger than two. That's one advantage. Another is that in normal English "differ …

Here is a very simple proof for nonnegative integer $p$. By elementary combinatorial reasoning, we have $$ \sum_{j=0}^{n-1} \binom{j}{p} = \binom{n}{p+1}, $$ which is the same as $$ \sum_{j=0}^{n-1} …

It is stated in many places that the first published reference to the four-colour problem (aka the four-color problem) was an anonymous article in The Athenæum of April 14, 1860, attributed to de Morg …

$R(4,5)=25$ B. D. McKay and S. P. Radziszowski, J. Graph Theory, 19 (1995) 309-322. The title is also the main theorem. $R(4,5)$ is a classical Ramsey number (the one most recently determined exact …

This is a sort of anti-answer. When the Unabomber Manifesto was published by the NYT, someone in sci.math (or sci.math.research) recognised the reasoning as being like that of a mathematician. I don' …