42,772 articles
History of quaternions
The history of quaternions begins with William Rowan Hamilton's 1843 discovery of a four-dimensional number system whose multiplication does not commute, carved into a Dublin bridge.
History of real and complex numbers
The history of real and complex numbers traces how complex numbers were used centuries before their definition, while real numbers got rigorous foundations only in the 1800s.
History of salt
The history of salt covers how humans obtained sodium chloride, the only rock humans eat, whose production, trade, and taxation shaped commerce and state finance from the Neolithic onward.
History of Science Museum, Oxford
The History of Science Museum in Oxford is a University of Oxford museum of historic scientific instruments, housed in the Old Ashmolean building since 1925.
History of scientific method
The history of scientific method traces how knowledge of the natural world is produced and tested, from Aristotle and Ibn al-Haytham through Francis Bacon to the Royal Society.
History of Solar System formation and evolution hypotheses
The history of Solar System formation and evolution hypotheses traces models since the 17th century, from Descartes's vortices and Laplace's nebular hypothesis to modern solar nebula theory.
History of space physics
History of space physics traces the study of charged particles and fields in space, from Birkeland's 1896 aurora theory through the satellite era that began with Explorer 1 in 1958.
History of special relativity
The history of special relativity covers the theory's development from aether electrodynamics through Lorentz and Poincaré to Einstein's 1905 papers and Minkowski's four-dimensional spacetime, widely accepted by 1911.
History of special-relativity experiments
The history of special-relativity experiments runs from nineteenth-century ether-drift interferometers such as Michelson–Morley in 1887 through muon and clock time-dilation tests to modern laboratory and astrophysical searches for Lorentz invariance violations, none confirmed.
History of statistics
The history of statistics, the science of drawing inference from data, runs from seventeenth-century state inventories and Graunt's 1662 mortality counts through least squares, Bayes' rule, and Fisher's inference theory.
History of superconductivity
The history of superconductivity follows the phenomenon of exactly zero electrical resistance from Heike Kamerlingh Onnes's 1911 discovery in mercury to the BCS theory and the 1986 cuprate breakthrough.
History of the Big Bang theory
The history of the Big Bang theory traces the idea of a hot, dense origin of the universe, from Lemaître's 1927 primeval-atom hypothesis to modern satellite observations.
History of the camera
The history of the camera traces the device from the camera obscura, through Niépce's first permanent photograph of 1826 or 1827 and the 1839 daguerreotype, to digital sensors.
History of the Church–Turing thesis
The history of the Church–Turing thesis traces the idea that every effectively calculable function is computable, from Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem to the independent 1936 proposals of Alonzo Church and Alan Turing.
History of the classification of finite simple groups
The history of the classification of finite simple groups traces the effort from Galois's concept to the 2004 completion of a proof spanning over 10,000 pages.
History of the compass
The history of the compass traces the magnetic direction-finder from Han-dynasty China's lodestone spoon through the magnetized floating needles of Song China and medieval Islam to Europe's pivoted card compass.
History of the Deep Space Network
The history of the Deep Space Network begins in 1958, when JPL built the first deep space antenna at Goldstone, California, and spans six decades of growth.
History of the Doppler effect
The history of the Doppler effect covers Christian Doppler's 1842 proposal on star colors, Buys Ballot's 1845 railway experiment, the Vienna Academy's 1852 condemnation, and later spectroscopic confirmation.
History of the equivalence principle
The history of the equivalence principle traces how Galileo's observation that all bodies fall alike was made precise by Newton and elevated by Einstein in 1907 into general relativity.
History of the identification and classification of star clusters and stellar associations
The history of the identification and classification of star clusters and stellar associations traces how astronomers moved from Messier's 1774 catalog to Trumpler's classification and Gaia's modern cluster census.
History of the metre
The history of the meter spans from its 1790s definition as one ten-millionth of the Paris meridian quadrant to the 1983 definition fixing the speed of light.
History of the metric system
The metric system was created in revolutionary France in the 1790s, spread through Europe, and was formalized by the 1875 Metre Convention before becoming the SI in 1960.
History of the periodic table
The history of the periodic table traces its development from Lavoisier's first element list in 1789 through Mendeleev's 1869 periodic system to the table's completion by IUPAC in 2016.
History of the second law of thermodynamics
The history of the second law of thermodynamics traces the law from Sadi Carnot's 1824 analysis of heat engines through Clausius and Kelvin to standardized statements around 1900.
History of the telescope
The history of the telescope runs from Hans Lippershey's 1608 patent application in Holland through Galileo's 1609 astronomical observations, Newton's reflector, and the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.
History of thermodynamics
History of thermodynamics, also called the mechanical theory of heat, traces the science of heat, work, and energy from Sadi Carnot's 1824 analysis of steam engines.
History of timekeeping devices
The history of timekeeping devices spans roughly 5,000 years, from ancient Egyptian sundials and water clocks through Huygens's pendulum clock and Harrison's marine chronometer to quartz and atomic clocks.
History of tornado research
History of tornado research is the development of tornado science from the first statistics in the 1880s to the 1948 Tinker forecast, radar detection, the Fujita scale, and VORTEX.
History of trigonometry
The history of trigonometry follows the development of the field from Greek chord tables by Hipparchus and Ptolemy, through the Indian sine tradition and al-Tusi's systematization of all six functions, to European treatises and logarithms.
History of type theory
The history of type theory runs from Russell's 1908 ramified response to the set-theoretic paradoxes, through Church's simply typed lambda calculus of 1940, to modern proof assistants.