• TachyonTele@piefed.socialEnglish
      62·
      2 days ago

      Huh, guy did a …couple things

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

      • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        16·
        2 days ago

        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”

          • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            6·
            1 day ago

            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.

      • CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.worldEnglish
        32·
        2 days ago

        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.

  • Warl0k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    34·
    2 days ago

    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…

    • Nailbar@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      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.worldEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

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

    • Agent641@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      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

  • M137@lemmy.todayEnglish
    7·
    1 day ago

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

  • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      23 hours ago

      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.