Achievements in maths

508 points · 73 comments · view on lemmy.world

73 Comments

OldSageRick@lemmy.zip · 145 pts · 98d (1 reply)

negativenull@piefed.world · 77 pts · 98d

PugJesus@piefed.social · 63 pts · 98d (14 replies)
TachyonTele@piefed.social · 69 pts · 98d (9 replies)

Huh, guy did a ...couple things

I'm surprised they didn't just rename mathamatics after him and be done with it

CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world · 40 pts · 98d (4 replies)

Eulerology? Eulerhythmics? Eultonics? Euleronomics?

Maybe we should go back a step and give science to the scientologists, and make science Euler centric. No more scientists, now all Eulerists. They Eule night and day solving the worlds fundamental mysteries.

grue@lemmy.world · 24 pts · 97d

Eulerhythmics?

Sweet memes are made of this.

JoMiran@lemmy.ml · 7 pts · 97d (2 replies)

Eulerics

Agent641@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 97d (1 reply)

Eurythmics

Great band

CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 97d

You should elaborate. Talk to me...

...like lemmings do.

wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works · 20 pts · 97d (3 replies)

To be fair, they kind of already did rename all of mathematics after a guy, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, who wrote the book "al-Kitāb al-Mukhtaṣar fī Ḥisāb al-Jabr wal-Muqābalah" or, in a Latin bastardization: Al Goritmi, author of Al-Jabr.

You know him because his name is the word "Algorithm", and his book was so revolutionary that we named the entire branch of mathematics it covered after it: "Algebra"

wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz · 5 pts · 97d (2 replies)

Algebra was named after al-Jabir, whose name in Latin is Geber.

wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works · 10 pts · 97d (1 reply)

Well, the wikipedia page for both Al-Khwarizmi and algebra both disagree with you, as does the wiki page for Geber, and, oh yeah, the journal of the history of mathematics: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2006.02.006

"It is well known that our word “algebra” derives ultimately from the Arabic al-jabr, which is part of the name al-jabr wa’l-muq¯abala given to the art of algebra in medieval times. Further, the individual words al-jabr and al-muq¯abala are associated with two steps in the simplification of equations. Al-jabr is the word used in conjunction with moving subtracted quantities to the other side of the equation, and al-muq¯abala is used to combine like terms on opposite sides of the equation."

I have additional notes, if the literal source on the history of math is insufficient to convince you of the history of math.

wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz · 3 pts · 97d

Okay, maybe I got "algebra" confused with "gibberish" qua relation to al-Jabir...

Dadifer@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 98d (3 replies)

Why does he have a towel on his head?

PugJesus@piefed.social · 39 pts · 98d

'Twas the style at the time! At least for academics who didn't want to wear a wig (which was also the style at the time).

Danquebec@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 97d (1 reply)

Do you expect such a guy to be normal?

Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 69d

Ironically he seems to have been one of the most normal historical people in general:
"Euler was known as a generous and kind person, not neurotic as seen in some geniuses, keeping his good-natured disposition even after becoming entirely blind."

Weirdest thing i can find about him is that he married his wife's half-sister after his wife died, which is only slightly "huh" worthy.

chrisbtoo@lemmy.ca · 46 pts · 98d (21 replies)

OK, I'll ask the question: who's the first guy?

PugJesus@piefed.social · 74 pts · 97d (20 replies)

Simon Bolivar, liberator of most of South America. Bolivia is named after him.

jdr@lemmy.ml · 28 pts · 97d

Don't forget The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

chrisbtoo@lemmy.ca · 16 pts · 97d (1 reply)

Thanks! I had just done my first ever reverse image search and found that out.

My best guess up until then was he was called Bob France or something 🙂

zout@fedia.io · 11 pts · 97d

There are no remaining pictures of Bob France, so we can only speculate what he looked like.

LodeMike@lemmy.today · 10 pts · 97d (14 replies)

Peanuts. There's an entire hemisphere of earth named after one guy

SomethingBurger@jlai.lu · 20 pts · 97d (6 replies)

Kanye West?

chrisbtoo@lemmy.ca · 14 pts · 97d (1 reply)
Kichae@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 96d

Admiral William North

gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 9 pts · 97d (3 replies)

Amerigo Vespucci

SomethingBurger@jlai.lu · 8 pts · 97d (2 replies)

America isn't a hemisphere

wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 97d

No, bit the vast majority of all the land in the western hemisphere is called America.

CanadaPlus@futurology.today · 2 pts · 96d

Plus or minus some uninhabited ocean it (as in the two continents) comes very close. It's basically down to a rounding error of volcanic islands.

NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone · 4 pts · 97d

Simon Weston?

deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz · 4 pts · 97d (5 replies)

Mr Pacific Ocean?

Because the other hemisphere is full of imperialists sitting up the place.

LodeMike@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 97d (4 replies)

America

deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz · 7 pts · 97d (3 replies)

Yeah, I got the reference. Not an entire hemisphere, that's just ameri-centrism.

LodeMike@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 97d (2 replies)

An approximate hemisphere of land

deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz · 5 pts · 97d

Not even close. The American continents are approximately the same size as the Atlantic Ocean.

The Pacific actually contains it's own antipodal point: it is literally half the globe: a hemisphere.

Or to put it another way. The Americas span approximately five time zones. That's 75°, let's be generous and say six to get a nice even 90°. That's one quarter.

starchylemming@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 97d (1 reply)

you should add name tags to the portraits

unless you do that on purpose to lure people into the comment section

PugJesus@piefed.social · 9 pts · 97d

Generally I don't make the memes. I'm just a reposter, and a lazy one at that.

Warl0k3@lemmy.world · 39 pts · 98d (11 replies)

There used to be a humor wikipedia page called something like "List of things discovered by Leonard Euler but not named after Leonard Euler (due to the volume of prior contributions to the field already named after Leonard Euler)" and it was long. Guy was foundational in everything from modern cryptography to optics to music theory...

SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 98d (8 replies)

Wait, it's all math?

Pat_Riot@lemmy.today · 18 pts · 97d

jgamble@fosstodon.org · 5 pts · 98d (5 replies)

@SpaceNoodle @Warl0k3

[Insert two astronauts on the Moon looking up at Earth meme here]

SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 98d (4 replies)

The correct answer was "always has been."

jgamble@fosstodon.org · 2 pts · 98d (3 replies)

@SpaceNoodle

I like to think that that was implied.

SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 97d (2 replies)

Listen, I don't make up the rules; I just enforce them arbitrarily. Also, I make up the rules.

jgamble@fosstodon.org · 1 pts · 97d (1 reply)

@SpaceNoodle

You mean it's nothing but rules?

SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 97d

Always has been?

deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz · 3 pts · 97d
[ removed ]
captainlezbian@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 97d (1 reply)

Damn, nobody has linked an archive of it yet…

Slein4273@feddit.org · 4 pts · 97d

Not the list that was mentioned, but the lists of reasons why it existed in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_named_after_Leonhard_Euler

Avicenna@programming.dev · 28 pts · 97d (2 replies)

You could perhaps put Gauss in the same category too

frank@sopuli.xyz · 23 pts · 97d (1 reply)

In the same sphere, if you will

Avicenna@programming.dev · 10 pts · 97d

He would like that

Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 98d (1 reply)

So math has a BE and an AE era: Before Euler and After Euler

wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 97d

Let's be clear: even if we are ascribing to the "great man" school of thought in history, rather than the "shoulders of giants" school, there were plenty of other epochs in the history of mathematics that already have adjectival versions, derived from the people who developed that new area of mathematics:

  • Pythagorean (Pythagoras)
  • Euclidean (Euclid)
  • Algorithmic (Al-Khwarizmi)
  • Newtonian (Newton)
  • Gaussian (Gauss)
  • Bayesian (Bayes)

So using Euler as a singular epoch to the exclusion of others' contributions is not particularly useful, since other people have also developed entire branches of mathematics. What Euler did for discrete mathematics/graph theory, Newton and Leibniz did for calculus, Al-Khwarizmi did for algebra, Bayes did for statistics, and Euclid did for geometry.

I personally think you can't disentangle any of them from their contemporaries and forebears, since they were, all of them, in constant communication, collaboration, and competition with one another. You don't get the brilliance of Newtonian physics or calculus without Robert Hooke and Gottlieb Leibniz, and Bayesian statistics was largely developed by Laplace. Where is Peano in here, who formulated the axioms upon which all mathematics rests? The tusi couple anticipated Copernicus' model of orbital mechanics hundreds of years before he and Kepler picked up pens, and is mathematically equivalent to an ellipse surrounding the sun, if you were to graph them all out on the same paper.

It's not particularly meaningful to try to say that "so-and-so is the father of ______", because it completely ignores and belittles the contributions of others upon whom each of these people relied, in favour of an easier-to-memorize history of old, dead white men who are the sole progenitors of civilisation.

SnoringEarthworm@sh.itjust.works · 19 pts · 97d (3 replies)

Can anyone explain Euler's... hat?

nailbar@sopuli.xyz · 15 pts · 97d

I think it started as a hood, but it grew longer because nobles wanted to show everyone they could afford the extra fabric, which was expensive, and eventually they started piling it up on the head because the hood tip was getting so long it was in the way, and you eventually ended up with that thing in the picture.

Or I'm way off, and this is not the hat I was thinking about 🤷

pelya@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 97d

I always imagined this portrait was made right after Euler washed his hair, and it's just a towel.

Agent641@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 97d

He's at a stag do, they all have to wear their underwear on their heads and line up to do tequila shots out of the strippers cleavage

Septimaeus@infosec.pub · 14 pts · 97d

Calc 3 prof would print this and put it on his door

chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 97d

Generally, in math, theorems are named after the people who formulate them as conjectures, not the people who prove them.

That’s why it’s Fermat’s Last Theorem, not Wiles’ Last Theorem, even though Andrew Wiles is the one who proved it. Same goes for the Poincaré Conjecture (which is now a theorem): proved by Grigoriy Perelman.

M137@lemmy.today · 8 pts · 97d (2 replies)

What's with the fucked letter spacing? I felt dyslexic while reading that.

edgemaster72@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 97d

Broke: dyslexia friendly fonts

Woke: dyslexia inducing fonts

SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 97d
jacksilver@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 97d

I always bring this up when talking about graph theory and the Seven Bridges of Konigsber. As, yet again, it's the first recorded thereom related to graph theory.

flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz · 5 pts · 98d

Amerigo Vespucci: amateurs

darklamer@feddit.org · 4 pts · 97d

Euler sux — Gauß 4-ever!!!

Danquebec@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 97d (2 replies)

Having an entire historical era named after you

In only one country

WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 97d (1 reply)

In an empire encompassing a quarter of the world.

Danquebec@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 97d

I think that time frame is known as "British Colonization" rather than "Victorian Era" in many of the concerned countries.

Danquebec@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 97d (2 replies)

Why does Euler's portrait looks to be AI generated?

flandish@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 97d

because the era in which it was made was growing in its style, this is by Emanuel Handmann from 1753. source

It was after Vermeer, but i think in a similar style.

Deebster@infosec.pub · 6 pts · 97d

It's Euler's picture on Wikipedia, by Jakob Emanuel Handmann in 1753.