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When I read these stories, it always amazes me how the ordinary terms we use everyday are simply the names of the people who discovered them. That and how diffi
by coldcode 12y ago
When I read these stories, it always amazes me how the ordinary terms we use everyday are simply the names of the people who discovered them. That and how difficult it was to make discoveries back then when even the math wasn't fully formed. Today we just ask Google for anything we don't know.
- KhalilK 12y agowhen even the math wasn't fully formed You'd be surprised by how much of today's used mathematics is actually "old". I mean most of it (even the mathematics of electromagnetism) hasn't changed since the 19th century and before, we are using the same theorems they used at the time.
- nsrango 12y agoIt depends on what you mean by fully formed. For example the idea of vectors and quaternions, which seem so natural, is quite new (~250 years old) [1] When maxwell derived and unified electromagnetic theory, he didn't use constructs like the gradient and divergence of vector fields (those concepts didn't exist), instead performing those operations 'just' partial derivatives [2]. Sure, the math is explicitly identical, but the modern concepts of operators on vector fields that is so powerful just didn't exist which, to me, is rather telling about the evolution mathematical thinking: we are all doing the same thing (and have been for a long time) but way we think about it evolves with our notation. And notation that we are used to is actually quite new [1] https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~temple/MAT21D/SUPPLEMENTARY-ARTICLES/Crowe_History-of-Vectors.pdf https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~temple/MAT21D/SUPPLEMENTARY-AR... [2] http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/155/459.full.pdf http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/155/459.full....
- pp19dd 12y agoLanguages are so weird when deconstructed. My observation is that English in particular seems to have a big lead on eponyms.