The first English professor of mathematics | Hacker News Reader

The first English professor of mathematics

thonyc.wordpress.com

66 pointsHooke8 comments

This project is cool: https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/

You can search for a mathematician, find who was their advisor, and their advisor, and so on.

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

I didn't know of this

Galileo Galilei, Torricelli -> Vincenzo Viviani -> Isaac Barrow -> Isaac Newton

It's pretty amazing - almost everyone goes back to a few greats: Gauss, Euler, Hilbert, and sometimes Newton.

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?

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.

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.

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

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