Questions tagged [language]
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From where did the term "context-free" originate?
In Greibach's survey Formal Languages: Origins and Directions, she writes the following paragraph on page 19 about the term "context-free":
The theory of context-free languages was being ...
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Did Alan Turing know the German language?
In the film "The Imitation Game" Alan Turing, while being interviewed at Bletchley Park, confesses that he doesn't speak German, which almost makes him fail the interview. I think I read ...
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How do we explain the lack of activity in the study of Latin mathematics?
A full professor teaching the history of mathematics at Masters level recently told a friend of mine that there was nothing of interest left to explore in the mathematics written in Latin over the ...
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Did Euler know Ancient Greek?
In a previous question on this website: What was Euler's first language?,
Alexandre Eremenko wrote the following about Leonard Euler:
There is little doubt that he also learnt French in his ...
user18960
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How many languages does Paul Erdős have publications in?
I was flicking through these slides by Prof. Richard Brent, wherein we have:
Erdős (1955, in Hebrew) gave an upper bound M(n) = o(n2) as n → ∞. After some encouragement by Linnik and Vinogradov, he ...
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Was there ever a word for 24 like "dozen" for 12? [closed]
The English language has more than one word for 12 (twelve, dozen) and 12^2 (one hundred and forty-four, gross), but has there ever been a word for 2*12 other than twenty-four?
I would also be ...
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Historical example of research papers being misinterpreted due to poor wording and creating controversy?
Is there any example of major controversy in the scientific community caused due to poor wording and/or misinterpretation of words?
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why do we write `abelian` group instead of `Abelian` group?
Suppose an object (or a concept or ...) is named after the person X, in honor of Mr. or Mrs. X in mathematics: X-ian objects/ <...
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What dialect of ancient Greek was taught to natural philosophers?
Ancient Greek had a large impact on scientific and mathematical language and thinking leading into the Enlightenment period and beyond. But "ancient Greek" could refer to any dialect ...
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Is there a reason $⊑$ in CSP is analogous to $⊇$ (as opposed to $⊆$)?
The 'square' subset symbols are sometimes used to express analogous concepts to subsets, like prefixes or suffixes.
However their use in CSP seems to be counterintuitive to their shape: $⊑$ appears ...
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When has the notion of "programming language for machines" emerged?
Nowadays, it seems just common sense to write a program in a high-level programming language and let it be compiler (or interpreted) into machine code to run a computer. However, when did the ...
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Origin of arcminutes, arcseconds, "arcthirds," "arcfourths," etc
This section of a Wikipedia article says
[Modern time and angle notation] contrasts with the numbers used by Hellenistic and Renaissance astronomers, who used thirds, fourths, etc. for finer ...
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Why are permutations ($_nP_r$) called differently in non-English languages ("variations" in German)?
First of all, you should be at least a little familiar with combinatorics to understand that question.
Some often used calculator keys in stochastic are the nCr and nPr ones.
Edit: I've first asked ...
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Whether Euclid considered squares to be rectangles
When I look up
'that which is right-angled but not equilateral'
there are translations that show the word before the above phrase to 'oblong', some that show 'rectangle' and some that show both ...
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What explanations are there for this strong spike in the use of 'angular momentum' in the 1960s?
A recent comment called my attention to the Google Ngram for 'angular momentum', which shows a very strong and rather sharp peak in the usage of the phrase shortly after 1960, followed by a steady ...
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