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

8 votes

History of the abstract method in mathematics

The question is interesting, but presupposes that we understand and accept Amir's conclusion, namely that "we owe Definition by abstraction (taking equivalence classes as new objects) to the the abstr …
Joël's user avatar
  • 26.1k
20 votes

Do mathematical objects disappear?

Hopefully at some point, GRH will be proved, and then the Siegel zeros of Zeta functions will disappear. There are currently thousands of papers on them.
24 votes

Understanding a quip from Gian-Carlo Rota

I think you are misinterpreting the quote. In the last sentence, the word "source" does not mean "source of these theories (K-theory, categories, group representations", but "source of the theory of s …
20 votes

Was Cauchy prescient?

After having read Katz' article, I must say I am not convinced and find that the standard interpretation, namely that of Cauchy making a mistake in 1821 and failing to acknowledging it or correcting i …
4 votes

Did Cauchy think that uniform and pointwise convergence were equivalent?

I recommend the reading of a wonderful 15-page text of Imre Lakatos, "Another case study of the method of proofs and refutations", which discuss precisely what Cauchy knew and didn't know and did and …
Joël's user avatar
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59 votes

The most outrageous (or ridiculous) conjectures in mathematics

I propose Edward Nelson's "conjecture" that Peano's arithmetic is inconsistent. First, to be honest, I am not aware that he stated it as "conjecture", using that word, but this is something he said …
11 votes

Fermat's opponents

The point (5) is at most doubtful. It was made by Mahoney in his book on Fermat, but Mahoney's interpretation of what Digby writes to Wallis does not correspond to what Digby actually writes, as quote …
Joël's user avatar
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77 votes

What are some very important papers published in non-top journals?

The way the question is written seems a little weird to me. At first, a phenomenon is described and presented as a fact: many very important papers are published in journals much less well-ranked than …
8 votes

Mathematicians who made important contributions outside their own field?

Grassmann made his most important contribution in Linguistics. Poincaré, besides his enormous work in mathematic, also add very important contribution to physics, and his work in philosophy of scienc …
13 votes

Have you solved problems in your sleep?

An interesting piece to read which tells the story of a dream leading, not to a single result, but a fundamental shift in a mathematician's work (leading to the proof, with collaborators, of Local Lan …
14 votes

Ramanujan's tau function

All questions of the form 'Why was such a mathematician interested in such a subject?' are difficult, and have a tendency to become metaphysical ('why are we doing mathematics in general?", and then " …
Joël's user avatar
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21 votes

History and motivation for Tannaka, Krein, Grothendieck, Deligne et al. works on Tannaka-Kre...

(Edited to correct mistakes signaled in comments below). I don't know much about the first steps on the theory, Krein and Tannaka. I can just say their works answer a question that seems very natural …
Joël's user avatar
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27 votes
Accepted

Deligne Weil II

To complete Carlo's answer, I think that one thing that can explain the long gap (in addition of the amount of difficult material in Weil II) is that Deligne felt the need to consolidate his result of …
Joël's user avatar
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10 votes
Accepted

Le Haut Commissariat qui surveille rigoureusement l'alignement de ses Grandes Pyramides

I disagree with Michael Grünewald's interpretation, which by the way doesn't answer the initial question: who Godement is he referring too? I think this is a joke made without acrimony. "Thought polic …
Joël's user avatar
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42 votes

Was the early calculus inconsistent?

The question is not precise enough to get a definite answer, but not for the reason most people say in commentaries. The problem does not lie in the ambiguous meaning of "consistent" (which just means …
Joël's user avatar
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