History of Mathematics Project | Hacker News Reader

History of Mathematics Project

history-of-mathematics.org

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Looks very interesting. Can anyone tell us about the National Museum of Mathematics? Could someone in NYC stop by and report back? :)

An excellent resource for the history (and present) of mathematical concepts is, believe it or not, the Oxford English Dictionary. They usually quote the mathematician who developed the concept (the OED always has historical quotes as examples, including, where possible, the first usage in history), show how the word's usage changed over time and by different populations, and include a brief but clear, accurate (AFAICT) definition or definitions.

This is fantastic the presentation is very both well done and not dumbed down - genius curation and exposition.

Currently enjoying exploring Turing's Zeta function machine

https://history-of-mathematics.org/artifacts/turings-zeta-fu...

Mathematicians, especially young students often find interesting patterns, correspondences, sequences and proofs.

Sadly the pinnacle of math can make these joyful inventive discoveries pale in comparison modern formulations to quadratic formulas, pythagoras, quaternions, boolean algebra, etc.

History shows us that our own daily math discoveries may really be amazing achievements that we should be very proud of as there was a long period of time when very clever mathematicians knew nothing of the abstraction we just found.

So math history shows us our intuitions are equal to some of the giants whose shoulders we stand on and we are good mathematicians who can find things out for ourselves and not 'bad' mathematicians just because we can't regurgitate lengthy formulas on demand.

This is awesome. I wished they taught something like this in high school instead of God knows what's being taught nowadays.

This is generally how I think of all the sciences and math at school level. Everyone would retain a lot more if we taught them "the how" we discovered magnetism, acidity, DNA, and complex numbers than what we currently do, which is just teaching them the formulas and the conclusions. With a framework it's easier to learn the "what".

Sadly you dont have much time to do those things unless you do extracurricular classes.

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