George Boole was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought (1854) which contains Boolean algebra. Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the information age. Boole maintained that:
No general method for the solution of questions in the theory of probabilities can be established which does not explicitly recognise, not only the special numerical bases of the science, but also those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning, and which, whatever they may be as to their essence, are at least mathematical as to their form.
In mathematics before the 1970s, the term umbral calculus referred to the surprising similarity between seemingly unrelated polynomial equations and certain shadowy techniques used to 'prove' them. These techniques were introduced by John Blissard (1861) and are sometimes called Blissard's symbolic method. They are often attributed to Édouard Lucas, who used the technique extensively.
James Joseph Sylvester FRS HFRSE LLD was an English mathematician. He made fundamental contributions to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory, and combinatorics. He played a leadership role in American mathematics in the later half of the 19th century as a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and as founder of the American Journal of Mathematics. At his death, he was professor at Oxford.
Arthur Cayley F.R.S. was a British mathematician. He helped found the modern British school of pure mathematics.
In mathematics, the symbolic method in invariant theory is an algorithm developed by Cayley (1846), Siegfried Heinrich Aronhold (1858), Alfred Clebsch (1861), and Paul Gordan (1887) in the 19th century for computing invariants of algebraic forms. It is based on treating the form as if it were a power of a degree one form, which corresponds to embedding a symmetric power of a vector space into the symmetric elements of a tensor product of copies of it.
David Orlin Hestenes, Ph.D. is a theoretical physicist and science educator. He is best known as chief architect of geometric algebra as a unified language for mathematics and physics, and as founder of Modelling Instruction, a research-based program to reform K–12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education.
The Hasse–Minkowski theorem is a fundamental result in number theory which states that two quadratic forms over a number field are equivalent if and only if they are equivalent locally at all places, i.e. equivalent over every completion of the field. A related result is that a quadratic space over a number field is isotropic if and only if it is isotropic locally everywhere, or equivalently, that a quadratic form over a number field nontrivially represents zero if and only if this holds for all completions of the field. The theorem was proved in the case of the field of rational numbers by Hermann Minkowski and generalized to number fields by Helmut Hasse. The same statement holds even more generally for all global fields.
Sylvester's law of inertia is a theorem in matrix algebra about certain properties of the coefficient matrix of a real quadratic form that remain invariant under a change of basis. Namely, if A is the symmetric matrix that defines the quadratic form, and S is any invertible matrix such that D = SAST is diagonal, then the number of negative elements in the diagonal of D is always the same, for all such S; and the same goes for the number of positive elements.
Louis Hirsch Kauffman is an American mathematician, topologist, and professor of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is known for the introduction and development of the bracket polynomial and the Kauffman polynomial.
Operational calculus, also known as operational analysis, is a technique by which problems in analysis, in particular differential equations, are transformed into algebraic problems, usually the problem of solving a polynomial equation.
In mathematics, Cayley's Ω process, introduced by Arthur Cayley (1846), is a relatively invariant differential operator on the general linear group, that is used to construct invariants of a group action.
In mathematical invariant theory, an invariant of a binary form is a polynomial in the coefficients of a binary form in two variables x and y that remains invariant under the special linear group acting on the variables x and y.
In mathematical invariant theory, the catalecticant of a form of even degree is a polynomial in its coefficients that vanishes when the form is a sum of an unusually small number of powers of linear forms. It was introduced by Sylvester (1852); see Miller (2010). The word catalectic refers to an incomplete line of verse, lacking a syllable at the end or ending with an incomplete foot.
The Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics was a mathematics journal that first appeared as such in 1855, but as the continuation of The Cambridge Mathematical Journal that had been launched in 1836 and had run in four volumes before changing its title to The Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal for a further nine volumes. Papers in the first issue, which carried a preface dated April, 1855, and promised further issues on a quarterly schedule in June, September, December and March, have dates going back to November, 1854; the first volume carried a further preface dated January, 1857. From the outset, keeping the journal up and running was to prove a challenging task.
This is a glossary of terms that are or have been considered areas of study in mathematics.
This page is a glossary of terms in invariant theory. For descriptions of particular invariant rings, see invariants of a binary form, symmetric polynomials. For geometric terms used in invariant theory see the glossary of classical algebraic geometry. Definitions of many terms used in invariant theory can be found in, ,, ,, ,, , and the index to the fourth volume of Sylvester's collected works includes many of the terms invented by him.
In mathematical invariant theory, a perpetuant is informally an irreducible covariant of a form or infinite degree. More precisely, the dimension of the space of irreducible covariants of given degree and weight for a binary form stabilizes provided the degree of the form is larger than the weight of the covariant, and the elements of this space are called perpetuants. Perpetuants were introduced and named by Sylvester (1882, p.105). MacMahon and Stroh (1888) classified the perpetuants. Elliott (1907) describes the early history of perpetuants and gives an annotated bibliography. There are very few papers after about 1910 discussing perpetuants; is one of the few exceptions.
Karen Hunger Parshall is an American historian of mathematics.
Arthur Stafford Hathaway was an American mathematician.
