- NEW ENTRIES: PEOPLE:
- FRENEAU, Philip Morin Poet of the American Revolution [on poetry page].
- INTERESTING ITEMS ELSEWHERE:
- It's a Negative on Absolute Negative Temperatures by Jennifer Chu [MIT News Release, 2013/12/20] Describes research suggesting physicists should return to Gibbs's original, almost forgotten definition of entropy.
- Aristotle's Physics by Carlo Rovelli [2013/12]
- These Incredible Animated GIFs Are More Than 150 Years Old by Liz Stinson [Wired (2013 December 11)]
- INTERESTING ITEMS ELSEWHERE:
- The reception of relativity in the Netherlands by Jip van Besouw and Jeroen van Dongen [2013/11]
- Husserl, Cantor & Hilbert: La Grande Crise des Fondements Mathématiques du XIXeme Siècle by Arkady Nedel [2013/11]
- The Artist of the Unbreakable Code by Mark MacNamara [Nautilus 6, (2013)] About Edward Elgar's 1897 note to Dora Penny, which all the world's cryptographers have as yet failed to decipher.
- NEW PRIMARY SOURCES: PEOPLE:
- Wm. Robertson Smith: A forgotten universal genius: mathematician, scholar of Arabic, editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, liberal Presbyterian theologian (tried for heresy -- in 1876!). [CALCULUS; ELECTRICITY; GEOMETRY; LOGIC; PHILOSOPHY]
- INTERESTING ITEMS ELSEWHERE:
- The problem of space in the light of relativity: the views of H. Weyl and E. Cartan by Erhard Scholz [2013/10] "... we survey further developments in mathematics and physics of the second half of the 20th century, in which core ideas of Weyl's and/or Cartan's analysis of the space problem were further investigated (mathematics) or incorporated into basic theories (physics)."
- On first attempts to reconcile quantum principles with gravity by Alessio Rocci [2013/06] "First attempts" meaning in the years 1916-1930.
- INTERESTING ITEMS ELSEWHERE:
- The British Astronomical Association and the Great War of 1914-1918 by Jeremy Shears [2013/09] Describes the wartime experiences of some British astronomers, not all of whom survived the conflict.
- The Reverend Walter Bidlake of Crewe by Jeremy Shears [2013/09] "The Reverend Walter Bidlake, MA, FRAS, JP (1865-1938) was vicar of Crewe, England ... This paper describes Bidlake's astronomical activities and life, including a high profile libel case he brought."
- Frank McClean and the Ferncliffe Observatory at Tunbridge Wells by Jeremy Shears [2013/09]
- Reconsidering written language by Gopal Sarma [2013/09] What is interesting to me about this article is not so much its subject as its use of counterfactuals to do history of science.
- Disquisitiones 235 by Vladlen Timorin [2013/09] A modern retelling of section 235 of Gauss's Disquisitiones Arithmeticæ.
- Translation of "De integralibus quibusdam definitis, seriebusque infinitis" by C. J. Malmstèn [Journal für Mathematik 38, 1 (1849)]
- The many faces of the Bohr atom by Helge Kragh [2013/09]
- Mathematics discovered, invented, and inherited by Alexandre Borovik [2013/09] Although the mathematical part of this article is too technical for most readers (including me) to understand, its basic idea -- the rôle of tradition, here understood very subtly, in the progress of science -- is extremely interesting.
- A tale of ellipsoids in potential theory by Dmitry Khavinson and Erik Lundberg [2013/09] "Ellipsoids possess several beautiful properties associated with classical potential theory. Some of them are well known, and some have been forgotten. In this article we hope to bring a few of the 'lost' pieces of classical mathematics back to the limelight."
- The "Swamp Fox of Missouri" and his protractor by Amy Ackerberg-Hastings [2013/07] The Swamp Fox being Confederate guerilla Meriwether Jeff Thompson, and his protractor being, in Ms. Ackerberg-Hastings's words upon first seeing it, "Um, what is that? ... Rather ugly ...." But then she's a protractor enthusiast.
- The Giants' Shoulders #62: Roundup of history-of-science blogs, 2013 August.
- INTERESTING ITEMS ELSEWHERE:
- Numerical Chladni figures by Thomas Müller [European Journal of Physics 34, 1067 (2013)] "Chladni patterns of vibrating membranes or thin plates fascinated people already in the eighteenth century ... In this paper I present NumChladni, an interactive tool for studying arbitrary two-dimensional vibrating membranes based on the Finite Element method."
-
Exhaustive generation of "Mrs. Perkins's quilt"
square dissections for low orders
by Ed Wynn
[2013/08] And what is "Mrs. Perkins's Quilt", you ask?
And why should serious modern mathematicians bother with
such trivial non-professional works as, for instance,
Amusements in Mathematics
by Henry Ernest Dudeny
[London: Nelson, 1917]? Well ...
- Evolution of quasi-history in a Physics Textbook by Jonas R. Persson [2013/08] Discusses how the much-used Twentieth Century physics-textbook Sears & Zemansky presents the blackbody-formula saga: originally just the results, then anachronically in later editions. Persson considers this a missed opportunity.
- The Giants' Shoulders #61: Roundup of history-of-science blogs, 2013 July.
- NEW PRIMARY SOURCES: PEOPLE:
- Norman Ferrers: Overly modest Anglican priest-mathematician who became Master of Gonville and Caius and vice-chancellor of the University despite a shocking willingness to award fellowships to non-conformists. He invented Young tableaux half a century before Young, but didn't think anyone would be interested in them. [CLASSICAL MECHANICS; GEOMETRY; MATHEMATICS; PHYSICS; SPECIAL FUNCTIONS]
- J. Stuart Jackson: Another clerical mathematician under-rated in his time and forgotten since. [CONICS; GEOMETRY; MATHEMATICS; PHYSICS;]
- James Challis: A very distinguished Establishment astrophysicist who took the blame for Britain's failure to discover Neptune, advocated an unpopular hydrodynamic æther theory, and (in his capacity of Anglican clergyman) wrote about the identity of the Beast 666. [ÆTHER; ASTRONOMY; CELESTIAL MECHANICS; FLUID DYNAMICS; METEORS; MOON; PLANETS]
- INTERESTING ITEMS ELSEWHERE:
- Poweroids revisited - an old symbolic approach by J. S. Dowker [2013/07] "Jeffery's 1861 computations using finite difference calculus are resurrected and extended from forward differences to general delta operators ..."
- Einstein as armchair detective: The case of stimulated radiation by Vasant Natarajan [Resonance 6, 28 (2001)] Walks the reader through Einstein's 1917 radiation paper, the founding document of laser science.
- The Recurrent Nova T CrB Did Not Erupt in 1842 by Bradley E. Schaefer [The Observatory 133, 81 (2013)] Or, even Sir John Herschel made mistakes.
- George Gabriel Stokes in love! [Skull in the Stars 2013/06/04]
- Is mathematical history written by the victors? by Jacques Bair et al. [Notices AMS 60, 886 (2013)]
- Einstein's "Prague field-equation" -- another perspective by Domenico Giulini [2012/06] Re-examines one of Einstein's non-GR attempts at a theory of gravity.
- Sur deux formules de Frobenius et Stickelberger et inversion de Lagrange by Roger Gay et al. [2013/06] Old mathematics lives on.
- Note on Malmstèn's paper De Integralibus quibusdam definitis seriebusque infinitis by Alexander Aycock [2013/06] "We present a proof of the functional equation of the Dirichlet eta-function, which proof seems to be new but follows almost immediately from Malmstèn (1849)."
- A critique of Sadi Carnot's work and a mathematical theory of the caloric by N. D. Hari Dass [2013/06] A paraphrase of Carnot's work in modern language, but including all of Carnot's assumptions, e.g. the existence of caloric. Cenochronic history-of-science at its best.
- How do you measure a mountain on the Moon? [True Anomalies 2013/05]
- The Giants' Shoulders #60: Roundup of history-of-science blogs, 2013 June.