Real Life/Headscratchers/Math: Difference between revisions

** Generally, the more modern you get, the better people tend to be about naming. This is especially true in regards to living people, as, for example, Green and Tao might get kind of pissed if the Green-Tao theorem wasn't named after them. However, there are some situations in which the person who first made a conjecture will have the theorem named after them - for example, Fermat's Last Theorem is still called that even though Wiles proved it, and the Poincare conjecture will probably keep that name instead of becoming Perelman's theorem. (Although Fermat claimed to have proved it, his proof was never found.) There are some unfortunate situations in which an important result was discovered independently in many different places. For example, there's the famous Cauchy-Schwarz-Bunyakovsky inequality, discovered over the course of a century by three mathematicians. In most of the world, it's called the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, but in Russia, they still call it the Bunyakovsky inequality. There are other instances in which political barriers played a role. Sharkovsky's theorem wasn't known to much of the world until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Two American mathematicians, Li and Yorke, proved a less general result in the meantime, and while the use of the term "Sharkovsky's theorem" has spread, many still refer to the "Yorke-Li theorem." Generally, theorems are named after the discoverer. Just not necessarily the theorem's you've heard of.

*** My math professor just calls it Cauchy's inequality. :P But yes, he does love to talk about this. "Okay, now we'll be learning about Stoke's theorem, which probably wasn't discovered by Stokes, and it's basically just another version of Green's theorem, which Green probably stole from some other guy..."

::: Imagine that the square root of two ''could'' be written as A/B, where A and B have no common factors.

::: Then 2 = A^2 / B^2. Rewrite this as A^2 = 2.B^2.