5 ms·

The first English professor of mathematics

66 points by Hooke 9y ago

dx7tnt 9y ago
I don't think an English professor would be impressed with the grammar of this title.
partycoder 9y ago
This project is cool: https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/ https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/ You can search for a mathematician, find who was their advisor, and their advisor, and so on.
- pouetpouet 9y ago
  Lagrange and Laplace -> Poisson -> Michel Chasles -> Jean-Gaston Darboux -> Émile Borel -> Georges Valiron -> Laurent Schwarz -> Jacques-Louis Lions -> Haïm Brezis -> Pierre-Louis Lions -> Cédric Villani Lagrange also advised Fourier, Schwartz also advised Grothendieck, Borel also advised Lebesgue etc... Lagrange was advised by Euler, and Laplace by D'Alembert So another path is Euler -> Lagrange -> Fourier -> Navier another one: D'Alembert -> Laplace -> Poisson -> Dirichlet -> Lipschitz -> Felix Klein -> Lindemann -> Hilbert etc etc
  - partycoder 9y ago
    I didn't know of this Galileo Galilei, Torricelli -> Vincenzo Viviani -> Isaac Barrow -> Isaac Newton
  - soVeryTired 9y ago
    It's pretty amazing - almost everyone goes back to a few greats: Gauss, Euler, Hilbert, and sometimes Newton.
jernfrost 9y ago
Does anyone know how they calculated these logarithmic tables back then? Did they use any form of mechanical calculator, abacus, counting table, lookup tables or any other form of aid? Or did they simply write in out by hand on paper like on is usually taught in elementary school?
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Depends on the author. There were plenty of subtly wrong tables back in the day. These were often evaluated as Newton approximation, Taylor expansion or direct series if it converged fast enough.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    As a minor point I forgot to mention yesterday, Napier's logarithm was a different function from modern logarithm but satisfies many log laws in a wary. Additionally the first accurate multiplication algorithm faster than long multiplication has only been devised in XX century - Karatsuba's. Abacus is just a mechanical tool that represents long addition and multiplication.

66 points by Hooke 9y ago

I don't think an English professor would be impressed with the grammar of this title.

This project is cool: https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/ https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/ You can search for a mathematician, find who was their advisor, and their advisor, and so on.

pouetpouet 9y ago
Lagrange and Laplace -> Poisson -> Michel Chasles -> Jean-Gaston Darboux -> Émile Borel -> Georges Valiron -> Laurent Schwarz -> Jacques-Louis Lions -> Haïm Brezis -> Pierre-Louis Lions -> Cédric Villani Lagrange also advised Fourier, Schwartz also advised Grothendieck, Borel also advised Lebesgue etc... Lagrange was advised by Euler, and Laplace by D'Alembert So another path is Euler -> Lagrange -> Fourier -> Navier another one: D'Alembert -> Laplace -> Poisson -> Dirichlet -> Lipschitz -> Felix Klein -> Lindemann -> Hilbert etc etc
- partycoder 9y ago
  I didn't know of this Galileo Galilei, Torricelli -> Vincenzo Viviani -> Isaac Barrow -> Isaac Newton
- soVeryTired 9y ago
  It's pretty amazing - almost everyone goes back to a few greats: Gauss, Euler, Hilbert, and sometimes Newton.

jernfrost 9y ago

Does anyone know how they calculated these logarithmic tables back then? Did they use any form of mechanical calculator, abacus, counting table, lookup tables or any other form of aid? Or did they simply write in out by hand on paper like on is usually taught in elementary school?

AstralStorm 9y ago
Depends on the author. There were plenty of subtly wrong tables back in the day. These were often evaluated as Newton approximation, Taylor expansion or direct series if it converged fast enough.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  As a minor point I forgot to mention yesterday, Napier's logarithm was a different function from modern logarithm but satisfies many log laws in a wary. Additionally the first accurate multiplication algorithm faster than long multiplication has only been devised in XX century - Karatsuba's. Abacus is just a mechanical tool that represents long addition and multiplication.