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93 Example Questions

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up vote 6 down vote

added by MathsBooks Feb 21 '14 at 13:44

This seems far too broad to get an accurate and authoritative answer. – Jonathan Van Matre Mar 22 '14 at 3:55

up vote 4 down vote

added by User51 Mar 1 '14 at 10:02

This is a good question! – Andres Caicedo Apr 12 '14 at 17:45

up vote 3 down vote

added by Jonathan Van Matre Mar 21 '14 at 15:48

up vote 3 down vote

added by Jonathan Van Matre Mar 28 '14 at 4:56

up vote 2 down vote

added by Michael Weiss Feb 17 '14 at 17:47

This raises historical questions about early dynamics but also early notions of the limit concept, plus what was new in Galileo's work. – Michael Weiss Feb 17 '14 at 17:50

up vote 2 down vote

added by Brian Rushton Feb 19 '14 at 17:10

This is a canonical question, and a very natural response to reading Viète. In fact these might be the first three words that one would feel compelled to define in such an endeavor. – J. W. Perry Feb 21 '14 at 18:37

up vote 2 down vote

added by Colin McFaul Feb 25 '14 at 4:56

up vote 2 down vote

added by kaine Feb 27 '14 at 22:45

The body of the question would elaborate but graphene was discussed but deemed thermodynamically impossible for years before the "scotch tape" method was used to produce it from graphite. – kaine Feb 27 '14 at 22:47

up vote 2 down vote

added by BMS Mar 1 '14 at 2:09

up vote 2 down vote

added by Colin McFaul Mar 7 '14 at 18:47

up vote 2 down vote

added by J. H. S. Mar 10 '14 at 0:11

	... How did Boas find that out? – J. H. S. Mar 10 '14 at 3:20
	The mention of the date is interesting. Where does he say that? – Andres Caicedo Mar 10 '14 at 7:00
	In a short note which he wrote for the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal... It all had to do with a famous quotation by Augustine of Hippo. – J. H. S. Mar 13 '14 at 0:40
	Thank you. I'll have to look it up, I'm curious. – Andres Caicedo Mar 13 '14 at 1:46

up vote 1 down vote

added by Rebecca J. Stones Feb 17 '14 at 1:10

up vote 1 down vote

added by Colin McFaul Feb 18 '14 at 2:15

	Your profile tells me you are clearly in the math/science club. I am just wondering how you justify questions on the history of patent laws as being capstone questions in the history of science or the history of mathematics. While I am not immediately seeing the fit, I am open minded to arguments. – J. W. Perry Feb 18 '14 at 8:21
	Except for the market, patents affect science, technology and their development. – frabala Feb 18 '14 at 11:26
	@frabala So does the paper industry. So do a lot of things. – Jack M Feb 18 '14 at 11:32
	@J. W. Perry, I am trying to generate questions about how intellectual property policies have influenced scientific discovery and the spread of scientific discovery (commercialization, communication, etc). The US patent system is supposed to "promote the progress of science and useful arts;" does it? – Colin McFaul Feb 18 '14 at 18:11
	@Jack M, the relationship between the patent system and scientific discovery is much more direct than the relationship between the paper industry and scientific discovery. – Colin McFaul Feb 18 '14 at 18:12

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up vote 1 down vote

added by Wrzlprmft Feb 18 '14 at 17:36

Because somebody is bound to misunderstand it: Quotation marks denote ‘for lack of a better word”. – Wrzlprmft Feb 18 '14 at 18:02

Maybe too broad since the only forms of Ockham's razor with anything more than a nice platitudinous sound have a tendency to produce wildly different "judgments" about a given theory. The basic idea of "simpler theory is better (or, more likely to be true)" would have to be spelled out more. What is the relevant sort of simplicity? Fewest posited/theoretical entities? Ideological simplicity? Something else? The question might be fine with some specification (like would be put in the body of a real question). – Dennis Feb 19 '14 at 4:07

@Dennis: Yes, I some specification is definetely necessary about this question. Considering the razor itself, I thought about the criterion that it was reasonably invoked in historical scientific dispute (not necessarily by name). – Wrzlprmft Feb 19 '14 at 7:56

@Dennis I was going to say that the trouble is that Occam's razor is just a sort of philosophical rule of thumb, not exactly something a scientist would invoke explicitly in a peer reviewed paper ("And so, by Occam's razor, we have..."). But that's more of an answer to the question than a reason to close it. – Jack M Feb 19 '14 at 10:03

up vote 1 down vote

added by Andres Caicedo Feb 22 '14 at 3:56

I don't understand what you mean by "quality"? – Jack M Feb 22 '14 at 8:22

Do we have examples of important texts in Latin with serious grammatical mistakes or other infelicities, or perhaps too stiff or idiosyncratic? Is this more common than not? Does this make translation or understanding harder? – Andres Caicedo Feb 22 '14 at 8:43

up vote 1 down vote

added by Pat B Feb 23 '14 at 13:56

The way you state your question now, it is impossible to guess what you mean. (It is not even grammatical.) Could you please express yourself more clearly? – rem Feb 23 '14 at 15:46

Maybe: "Where is the slate on which Gauss made the discovery of the 17-gon, and the pipe that he gave to Bolyai as a souvenir? Is its location known today?" That is 147 characters, 3 below the character limit. – J. W. Perry Feb 24 '14 at 18:28

up vote 1 down vote

added by PLL Feb 24 '14 at 19:12

I’ve just posted a full version of this question on Mathoverflow. I would have waited to ask it here when this hits beta, but I’m hoping to get an answer in time for a talk coming up fairly soon. – PLL Feb 24 '14 at 19:16

up vote 1 down vote

added by Per Manne Feb 24 '14 at 21:35

up vote 1 down vote

added by Colin McFaul Feb 25 '14 at 5:10

Newton derived the 1/r^2 form of his law of gravitation from Kepler's 3/2's power law. – Colin McFaul Feb 25 '14 at 5:10

up vote 1 down vote

added by Confutus Feb 25 '14 at 20:45

up vote 1 down vote

added by J. H. S. Feb 25 '14 at 22:10

up vote 1 down vote

added by arjafi Mar 4 '14 at 15:14

up vote 1 down vote

added by Dheerendra Mar 6 '14 at 18:48

Did you perhaps mean atmospheric lightning? – Jonathan Van Matre Apr 3 '14 at 16:50

up vote 1 down vote

added by TooTone Mar 7 '14 at 23:56

Newton "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Whose work was vital for Principia and Calculus (and why)? – TooTone Mar 7 '14 at 23:58

up vote 1 down vote

added by Jonathan Van Matre Mar 28 '14 at 4:28

up vote 0 down vote

added by frabala Feb 18 '14 at 11:21

Maybe a tad borderline, but I don't think I'd vote to close. – Jack M Feb 18 '14 at 11:28

Maybe this question isn't directly connected with the history of maths and science. But, cryptography is an application of mathematics and wars have to do a lot with history. – frabala Feb 18 '14 at 11:32

And vice versa, history affects mathematics. Cryptanalyzing machines were constructed during wars. So, I guess wars have to do with the history of math. – frabala Feb 18 '14 at 11:44

@Jack M Borderline only in the fact that volumes of documentaries and much literature have been written on the subject. As stated, the question is very broad. This with some name drop focus like Turing, Enigma, and WW2 (one era) would bring it down to a level that is less than a big-list of answers, although focus on various other particular earlier eras (e.g. WW1, US civil war, Roman wars...) would be no less interesting. I find it quite historical and Mathematical in nature as historically mathematicians and human computers did pretty much all of this work. I share your initial hesitation. – J. W. Perry Feb 19 '14 at 4:19

I think "wars and the course they took" steers this question in the History.SE direction. A similar question aimed more in the direction of this site might be: "How has war influenced the development of cryptography? Has it caused the study of certain areas to be overemphasized, or others to be neglected?" In other words, put the focus on the scientific history, not the geopolitical history. – Jonathan Van Matre Mar 22 '14 at 4:03

show 1 more improvement suggestion

up vote 0 down vote

added by Dennis Feb 19 '14 at 4:02

I lack the physics background to understand this question, but I like it. – Jack M Feb 22 '14 at 8:22

up vote 0 down vote

added by Brian Rushton Feb 19 '14 at 17:10

	Proposed by Jack M. – Brian Rushton Feb 19 '14 at 17:13
	This is a good question iff its presupposition is correct. Did Jack M. give any references for the idea that mathematicians did ever struggle with this? – PLL Feb 24 '14 at 19:24
	@PLL There's a quote by Cardano specifically saying that the concept is absurd, and Viete in his New Algebra devoted pages to developing a theory of multiplying more than three numbers. I believe Descartes also spent quite a bit of time in his Geometrie making sense of the issue. The root of the problem was that multiplication was conceived of geometrically. – Jack M Feb 27 '14 at 11:11

up vote 0 down vote

added by MathsBooks Feb 21 '14 at 12:21

There are two contradictory versions of what was planned. 1st Version: Skip all 11 leap days from 1700 to 1740. 2nd Version: Skip the leap day 1700, then 7 days in November 1700, and finally drop the leap days in 1704, 1708 and 1712. That what had historically happened was a third version: The leap day 29 February was omitted in 1700 and no further reductions were made. This led to the 'Swedish Calendar'. In January 1711 Sweden turned back to the Old Style. An extra day -a unique 30 February- was added in 1712. In 1753 Sweden introduced the New Style, 17 February being followed by 1 March. – MathsBooks Feb 21 '14 at 12:36

How is this related to science? – Jack M Feb 22 '14 at 8:23

I think, this is related to a general interest in the context of the introduction of the new calender style in Europe, where great mathematicians were involved in! – MathsBooks Feb 24 '14 at 10:09

up vote 0 down vote

added by Per Manne Feb 24 '14 at 22:23

up vote 0 down vote

added by MathsBooks Feb 25 '14 at 10:56

up vote 0 down vote

added by Confutus Feb 25 '14 at 21:10

up vote 0 down vote

added by Confutus Feb 25 '14 at 21:40

up vote 0 down vote

added by J. H. S. Feb 25 '14 at 21:57

up vote 0 down vote

added by delete Feb 26 '14 at 3:23

up vote 0 down vote

added by BMS Feb 26 '14 at 4:53

Is there a better way to phrase this? I want to get at a development in math that was entirely "thought up," without science being an external motivation. Basically, mathematics for the sake of mathematics. – BMS Feb 26 '14 at 4:54

@BMS: How about “mathematics without any known or suspected application (at the time of its invention)”? – Wrzlprmft Feb 26 '14 at 10:16

up vote 0 down vote

added by kan Feb 26 '14 at 19:17

Perhaps too broad but I think this question is interesting if we restrict ourselves to just one area of Mathematics, for example. – kan Feb 26 '14 at 19:18

Here you can find plenty of them: mathoverflow.net/questions/24132/… – J. H. S. Mar 6 '14 at 0:14

up vote 0 down vote

added by Lost1 Feb 26 '14 at 23:29

Maybe a wording not presupposing things would help: "Were Galois's ideas rejected by his contemporaries; and if so, why?" – GEdgar Mar 22 '14 at 19:13