42,772 articles
History of chemistry
The history of chemistry traces how alchemy became quantitative experimental science in the 17th and 18th centuries, then a discipline with atomic theory and the periodic table.
History of climate change science
The history of climate change science traces how researchers moved from nineteenth-century ice age puzzles and heat-trapping gases to modern assessments of human-caused global warming.
History of coherence and polarization
The history of coherence and polarization traces optics from Bartholin's 1669 study of Iceland spar through Malus's naming of polarization to Wolf's unified statistical theory of 2003.
History of combinatorics
The history of combinatorics traces counting methods from Piṅgala's Sanskrit prosody around 200 BCE to their rise as an independent branch of mathematics in the twentieth century.
History of discrete spacetime ideas
The history of discrete spacetime ideas traces proposals that space and time are made of fundamental elements, from Riemann in 1854 to causal set theory founded in 1987.
History of Earth
The history of Earth covers the planet's roughly 4.54 billion years of change, from its formation and the Moon-forming impact to the rise of oxygen and life.
History of electrical engineering
The history of electrical engineering traces how electricity and magnetism became a quantitative science and then a profession, with turning points including Volta's pile, electromagnetism, induction, and the telegraph.
History of electromagnetic theory
The history of electromagnetic theory traces how electricity and magnetism developed from separate observations into a single theory, unified mathematically by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865.
History of entropy
The history of entropy covers the concept Rudolf Clausius named in 1865, Boltzmann's statistical form S = k log W, Shannon's 1948 information entropy, and Bekenstein's 1972 black-hole entropy.
History of general relativity
The history of general relativity covers Albert Einstein's development of the theory of gravitation between 1907 and 1915, from the equivalence principle to the 1915 field equations.
History of geometry
The history of geometry spans practical land measurement in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, Euclid's Elements around 300 BC, and the non-Euclidean geometries of the 19th century.
History of gold
The history of gold runs from the oldest worked gold at Varna, Bulgaria, through Lydian coinage and the 1848 California rush to the end of the gold standard in 1971.
History of gravitational theory
The history of gravitational theory traces how ideas of gravity developed from Aristotle and Galileo to Newton's 1687 law of universal gravitation, Einstein's 1915 general relativity, and gravitational waves.
History of hearing aids
The history of hearing aids traces amplifying devices from ear trumpets of the 1600s through carbon, vacuum tube, transistor, and digital generations to over-the-counter aids approved in 2022.
History of homological algebra
The history of homological algebra traces the study of homology and cohomology from Hilbert's 1890 syzygy theorem to Cartan and Eilenberg's founding 1956 treatise and Grothendieck's 1957 abelian categories.
History of Kac–Moody algebra theory
The history of Kac–Moody algebra theory traces the infinite-dimensional Lie algebras defined independently by Victor Kac and Robert Moody in 1967–68, through Macdonald's identities and physics applications.
History of mathematics
The history of mathematics is the record of how counting, measurement, calculation, and proof developed, from prehistoric notched bones through Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, India, China, the Islamic world, and Europe to the modern era.
History of matroid theory
The history of matroid theory covers its founding in Hassler Whitney's 1935 paper, its slow early reception, Tutte's 1958 excluded-minor theorems, and its 1960s revival in optimization.
History of Maxwell's equations
The history of Maxwell's equations traces how James Clerk Maxwell assembled twenty equations of electricity and magnetism between 1855 and 1873, which Oliver Heaviside condensed into the four taught today.
History of measurement
The history of measurement traces units of length, mass, volume, and time from ancient body-based standards like the Egyptian cubit through the 1791 metric system to the SI, fully defined by constants of nature in 2019.
History of measurement-based quantum computation
The history of measurement-based quantum computation began in 2000–2001, when Briegel and Raussendorf proposed the one-way quantum computer, in which single-qubit measurements on a fixed cluster state drive the computation.
History of non-associative algebra
The history of non-associative algebra traces algebraic systems where multiplication need not associate, beginning with Hamilton's 1843 quaternions and Graves's octonions and maturing through Hurwitz's 1898 theorem and Zel'manov's 1983 classification.
History of optics
The history of optics traces the science of light from Greek and Ptolemaic ray theories, through Ibn al-Haytham's experiments, to the wave theory, Maxwell, and the laser.
History of perpetual motion machines
The history of perpetual motion machines covers thirteen centuries of proposed self-running devices, from Lalla's 748 mercury wheel through Bessler's 1721 wheel to the second law of thermodynamics, which proves them impossible.
History of physics
The history of physics traces the study of matter, motion, energy, and force from ancient astronomy through the Scientific Revolution to relativity and quantum theory.
History of physics since the 1970s
The history of physics since the 1970s covers the Standard Model's confirmation through the 2012 Higgs discovery, the rise of precision cosmology, and LIGO's first gravitational-wave detection.
History of plasticity theory
The history of plasticity theory begins with Henri Tresca's 1864 yield criterion, continues through Hencky's 1924 deformation theory and the Prandtl–Reuss equations, and was consolidated in the 1940s.
History of quantum field theory
The history of quantum field theory (QFT) traces its development from Dirac's 1927 quantization of the electromagnetic field through renormalization to the Standard Model of particle physics.
History of quantum machine models
The history of quantum machine models traces abstract quantum devices from Paul Benioff's 1980 Hamiltonian model through Richard Feynman's 1982 proposal to David Deutsch's 1985 quantum Turing machine.
History of quantum mechanics
The history of quantum mechanics, or history of quantum physics, traces the theory describing matter and light at atomic scales from Planck's 1900 quanta to 1928.