Mathematics
- May/June - Russell's paradox: Bertrand Russell shows that Georg Cantor's naive set theory leads to a contradiction.
- Élie Cartan develops the exterior derivative.
- Leonard Eugene Dickson publishes Linear groups with an exposition of the Galois field theory in Leipzig, advancing the classification of finite simple groups and listing almost all non-abelian simple groups having order less than one billion.
- Aleksandr Lyapunov proves the central limit theorem rigorously using characteristic functions.
Read more about this topic: 1901 In Science
Famous quotes containing the word mathematics:
“Why does man freeze to death trying to reach the North Pole? Why does man drive himself to suffer the steam and heat of the Amazon? Why does he stagger his mind with the mathematics of the sky? Once the question mark has arisen in the human brain the answer must be found, if it takes a hundred years. A thousand years.”
—Walter Reisch (1903–1963)
“... though mathematics may teach a man how to build a bridge, it is what the Scotch Universities call the humanities, that teach him to be civil and sweet-tempered.”
—Amelia E. Barr (1831–1919)
“The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)