Viktor Bunyakovsky worked on Number Theory as well as geometry, mechanics and hydrostatics. He discovered the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality 25 years before Cauchy or Schwarz.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
The Cauchy-BUNYAKOVSKY-Schwarz inequality
Episode #2583 of "By the law of large numbers (of Russian mathematicians), your theorem has been proved by some Russian before you even thought of it":
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Big deal. Euler already knew it before all this rabble showed on the scene.
ReplyDeleteTO ANONYMOUS :
ReplyDeleteYou read Euler's mind or what ?
An act of planchette ?
No. But the law of Euler says that whatever was discovered in mathematics since Euler was known to him and a hint to that can be found in one of his 800 papers.
ReplyDeleteIt is not that useful to be the first one to discover something ; it is more important to be the *last* one to discover something!
ReplyDeleteBTW Gauss was famous for claiming all interesting results as his own, or as something "he had thought about"
ReplyDeleteBefore I came to the US I never heard of Cauchy-Schwarz. In Romania is was always CBS. It's only the imperialist propaganda that took Bunyakovsky out of the picture ;)
ReplyDeleteOh, and among Romanian students it was often said that CBS is all you ever need in life. However, the initials were usually taken to stand for "****, money and good health" :)
ReplyDeleteBTW Gauss was famous for claiming all interesting results as his own, or as something "he had thought about"
ReplyDelete...and his extensive diaries (published posthumously) prove that he was telling the truth.
Bunyakovsky was a student of Cauchy's in Paris. In Buyakovsky's paper he takes the discrete form of what we call Cauchy's inequality as well-known --- he does not acknowledge Cauchy, but his paper is written after Cauchy's. Buyakovsky's proof does not cover the case of general innner products --- in fact it only covers one dimensional integrals.
ReplyDeleteto Michael: That's very interesting. Thanks for posting it ! I wonder why the MacTutor archive (which is generally a good resource) states things this way.
ReplyDelete