Related:

• How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation?
  [the heat conduction equation] . . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying to derive it....
• What they said: What they meant: "If you knew this person as well as I know him, you would think as much of him as I do.
  (Or as little, to phrase it slightly more accurately....
• Brief History Of Linux (#2) Hammurabi's Open-Source Code Hammurabi became king of Babylonia around 1750BC.
  Under his reign, a sophisticated legal code developed...
• Nobert Weiner was the subject of many dotty professor stories.
  Weiner was, in fact, very absent minded. The following story is told about him...
• Newton realized that, according to his theory of gravity, the stars should attract each other, so it seemed they could not remain essentially motionless.
  Would they not all fall together at some point? In a letter in 1691 to Richard Bentley, another leading thinker of his day, Newton argued that this would indeed happen if there were only a finite number of stars distributed over a finite region of space....
• Then Nicholl, using his own calculations, demonstrated that it was absolutely impossible to give any object at all the velocity of 12,000 yards per second.
  And, algebra in hand, he maintained that even if such a velocity could be attained, such a heavy projectile could never be lifted beyond the limits of the Earth's atmosphere!...
• If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
• Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical lesso
  On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach your hand into a friend's mouth and touch one of his dental fillings....