History
Mollifiers were introduced by Kurt Otto Friedrichs in his paper (Friedrichs 1944, pp. 136–139), which is a watershed in the modern theory of partial differential equations. The name of the concept had a curious genesis: at that time Friedrichs was a colleague of the mathematician Donald Alexander Flanders, and since he liked to consult colleagues about English usage, he asked Flanders how to name the smoothing operator he was about to introduce. Flanders was a puritan so his friends nicknamed him Moll after Moll Flanders in recognition of his moral qualities, and he suggested to call the new mathematical concept a "mollifier" as a pun incorporating both Flanders' nickname and the verb 'to mollify', meaning 'to smooth over' in a figurative sense.
Sergei Sobolev had previously used mollifiers in his epoch making 1938 paper containing the proof of the Sobolev embedding theorem, as Friedrichs himself later acknowledged.
There is a little misunderstanding in the concept of mollifier: Friedrichs defined as "mollifier" the integral operator whose kernel is one of the functions nowadays called mollifiers. However, since the properties of an integral operator are completely determined by its kernel, the name mollfier was inherited by the kernel itself as a result of common usage.
Read more about this topic: Mollifier
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)