Related papers: Euler and the German Princess
The concept of a fluid algebra was introduced by Sullivan over a decade ago as an algebraic construct which contains everything necessary in order to write down a form of the Euler equation, as an ODE whose solutions have invariant…
Professor Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, best known for his doctrine of falsifiability. His axiomatic formulation of probability, however, is unknown to current…
This is an adapatation by U. Frisch of an English translation by Thomas E. Burton of Euler's memoir `Principes g\'en\'eraux du mouvement des fluides' (Euler, 1775b). Burton's translation appeared in Fluid Dynamics, 34} (1999) pp. 801-82,…
Scientific research is and was at all times a transnational (global) activity. In this respect, it crosses several borders: national, cultural, and ideological. Even in times when physical borders separated the scientific community,…
One of the most important philosophers in history, the German Friedrich Nietzsche, is almost ignored by physicists. This author who declared the death of God in the 19th century was a science enthusiast, especially in the second period of…
Neptune was telescopically discovered by Johan Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Louis d'Arrest in Berlin on 23 September 1846 based on the prediction by Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier. The role German astronomers played in the discovery has…
We review the history of neutron star physics in the 1930s that is related to L. Landau. According to recollections of Rosenfeld (1974, Proc. 16th Solvay Conference on Physics, p. 174), Landau improvised the concept of neutron stars in a…
Many have have taken in hand to write a treatise on the Star of Bethlehem, particularly on Kepler's explanation as a stellar birth, triggered by Mars joining a great conjunction (a meeting of Jupiter and Saturn), as he observed it in…
Incomputability as a mathematical notion arose from work of Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930s. Like Turing himself, it attracted less attention than it deserved beyond the confines of mathematics. Today our experiences in computer…
This is a historical introduction to the theory of Stirling numbers of the second kind S(n,k) from the point of view of analysis. We tell the story of their birth in the book of James Stirling (1730) and show how they mature in the works of…
In 1926, E. Schroedinger published a paper solving his new time dependent wave equation for a displaced ground state in a harmonic oscillator (now called a coherent state). He showed that the parameters describing the mean position and mean…
The Lorenz attractor was introduced in 1963 by E. N. Lorenz as one of the first examples of \emph{strange attractors}. However Lorenz' research was mainly based on (non-rigourous) numerical simulations and, until recently, the proof of the…
A strange title, might you say: Answer is in the question! However, contrary to popular belief and numerous citations in the literature, the image of the snowflake curve is not present or even mentioned in von Koch's original articles. So,…
In June 1965, Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, BVM, received the first US PhD in Computer Science, and this paper outlines her life and accomplishments. As a scholar, she has the distinction of being an early advocate of learning-by-example in…
Euler gives a long introduction, giving all the arguments for and against the use of divergent series in calculus and then gives his own definition of the sum of a diverging series. Then in the second half of this paper he evaluates the the…
Although practised as an art and science for ages, cryptography had to wait until the mid-twentieth century before Claude Shannon gave it a strong mathematical foundation. However, Shannon's approach was rooted is his own information…
We present a precise formulation of a correspondence between information and thermodynamics that was first observed by Szilard, and later studied by Landauer. The correspondence identifies available free energy with relative entropy, and…
The history of the elastica is examined through the works of various contributors, including those of Jacob and Daniel Bernoulli, since its first appearance in a 1690 contest on finding the profile of a hanging flexible cord. Emphasis will…
The problem of drawing geographical maps is the one of mapping a subset of the sphere, representing a country or some other region on the surface of the Earth, into the Euclidean plane, minimising certain distortion properties that are…
This paper is devoted to Poincar\'e's work in probability. Though the subject does not represent a large part of the mathematician's achievements, it provides significant insight into the evolution of Poincar\'e's thought on several…