4 ms·
My doctoral dissertation used quaternions to describe spacecraft attitudes. My advisor was a stickler for not only appropriately citing references, but citing t
by GlenTheMachine 8y ago
My doctoral dissertation used quaternions to describe spacecraft attitudes. My advisor was a stickler for not only appropriately citing references, but citing the most original (in the sense of oldest) references. This was something of a problem because the original references to some of the mathematical techniques I used were several hundred years old and not in English, and under the theory that a big part of the purpose of a citation is to help the reader understand the backgroud material this seemed a bit excessive. Nobody is going to learn French in order to read about Lagrange multipliers from Lagrange's original papers.
But for quaternions, it was easy: I actually cited the Brougham Bridge inscription. One cannot, of course, check the bridge out of the engineering library to check the citation, but clearly this was the original “publication” of quaternion multiplication.
My advisor finally got the point.
- ModernMech 8y ago> Nobody is going to learn French in order to read about Lagrange multipliers from Lagrange's original papers. You'd think, but I had a professor in physics who learned German just so he could read Boltzmann's original works.
- twtw 8y agoIt used to be common in hard sciences and mathematics for English-speaking doctoral candidates to be required to show some aptitude for German or Russian. Maybe still is, dunno.
- joeberon 8y agoIt’s definitely not
- dboreham 8y agoI believe German was required in order to study Chemistry back in the day.
- hprotagonist 8y agoit had to be. The bulk of the literature wasn’t in english. it is now..but it’s still good to know for reviewing the older work.
- paulgrant999 8y agoin fact this is the primary reasons why I want to learn French, Russian, German ;) reading the masters, is never a waste.
- iantrt 8y agoIf someone learned French to read about Lagrange multipliers from Lagrange's original papers, then they would be sorely disappointed: it was actually Euler who first used the Lagrange method! (And by some curious coincidence, the L/lambda could just as easily be a homage to Leonhard as to Lagrange...)
- lokedhs 8y agoDon't they say that mathematical concepts from Eulers era are named after the second person to use them?
- salty_biscuits 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
- lokedhs 8y agoThat is true too. But it's slightly different from the case of Euler who just invented so many things. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_L...