Questions tagged [hilbert]
David Hilbert (1862-1943) was a German mathematician and one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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What did Tait mean by saying Hilbert “was not in a position to appreciate Kant's antinomies of pure reason”?
Tait’s influential paper Finitism, 1981, writes (emphasis mine): For Hilbert the virtue of finitism lay in its security (Sicherheit). And for this reason he wished to found all of mathematics on it ...
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David Hilbert and the Boltzmann equation
On the wiki page of Ludwig Boltzmann, in the section about the Boltzmann equation, there it is written: The Boltzmann equation is notoriously difficult to integrate. David Hilbert spent years trying ...
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Why did Paul Gordan call Hilbert's basis theorem article theology?
I read in wikipedia page of Hilbert available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hilbert That: Hilbert sent his results to the Mathematische Annalen. Gordan, the house expert on the theory of ...
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Did Hilbert contribute to general relativity after its invention?
Reading about the priority of general relativity (GR), I read on how much David Hilbert was close in getting all the credit for it. However did Hilbert continued to work on GR after he published it? ...
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19th century attitudes toward Dedekind's work and infinitary arguments
I was intrigued to come across the following statement made by Hilbert: "In 1888, as a young private lecturer from Königsberg, I made a tour of the German universities. At my first stop, in ...
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Hilbert's program participants
Does anyone know about the Hilbert's program specifically? I want to know who participated in the program, and how it was progressed. Hilbert's Program: A program which tried to explain mathematics ...
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David Hilbert's paper: Substitution of the group of cyclotomic field
A question about a notation in David Hilberts's "Ein neuer Beweis des Kroneckerschen Fundamentalsatzes über Abelsche Zahlkörper" (here a german online available source, not sure if there ...
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What were people looking for when they started to study bounded linear functionals?
Very briefly, my understanding of the initial motivations for studying $L^p$ spaces included interest in the $\ell_2$ space, due to relationships with quadratic forms that arose from searching for ...
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Did J. W. Gibbs “invent” Hilbert spaces before Hilbert formulated the notion of such spaces?
I was surprised to see a reply to a comment on his answer to a Quora question by a research mathematician claiming that Hilbert spaces were actually due to J. W. Gibbs rather than to D. Hilbert. The ...
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What are Weber class field's weak points?
These days, I'm interested in class field theory. I know that Weber first made his own 'class field' and then Hilbert made his own field, 'Hilbert class field'. By the way, were there so many weak ...
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Historical background with Weber and Kronecker's Jugendtraum
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/74073/the-first-complete-proof-of-the-kronecker-weber-theorem I searched above link, and I was so interested about this post. Today, I have a question about ...
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Why did Hilbert believe consistency implies existence?
I am reading Sieg's "Hilbert's programs and beyond" and I am having difficulty understanding this quote by Hilbert on page 74: In the Paris Lecture Hilbert re-emphasized and expanded this ...
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Hilbert's criticism on the first version of Einstein's field equations
Crossposted at Physics Stack Exchange I have read once that Hilbert had some reservations regarding the first form of the field equations $$ R_{\mu\nu} = k T_{\mu\nu} $$ because it was not possible ...
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Is Edmund Whittaker claim that Hilbert proved General Relativity days before Einstein valid?
Are the claims of Sir Edmund Whittaker regarding David Hilbert's derivation of the general relativity theory predated that of Einstein by five days? This Wikipedia article that I found contains the ...
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Hilbert's problem list did not include Fermat's last theorem. Why?
Fermat's Last Theorem was open for more than 350 years until Andrew Wiles proved it in 1995. Are there possible (historical or other) reasons why David Hilbert did not include this famous open problem ...
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