from Hacker News

Chebyshev Polynomials in the 16th Century (2022)

by IdealeZahlen on 11/27/24, 2:58 PM with 36 comments

  • by ykonstant on 11/28/24, 9:14 AM

    Kind of off topic, but look at how beautiful the ar5iv link is:

    https://ar5iv.org/html/2203.10955

    I am getting more and more excited about converting TeX sources to HTML5 to be more accessible to students and researchers.

    I do think PDF is still king for final results and of course print, but the accessibility and searchability the web format provides is fantastic.

  • by bee_rider on 11/27/24, 4:17 PM

    I will always be amazed at these guys who did numerical algorithms before computers were a type of machine.

    Something that has always confused me about these Russians, Chebyschev and Krylov, what use did they have for their iterative methods and subspaces? I guess they weren’t solving big sparse linear systems on distributed computers in the year 1900.

  • by dukeofdoom on 11/27/24, 5:07 PM

    Would love to watch a videos on historical math breakthroughs. In the style of Indiana Jones, I mean just told as a big adventure. I used to watch connections and loved it.

  • by alphanumeric0 on 11/27/24, 6:21 PM

    Ah cool to see this on HN! I'm taking a numerical calc class right now and it's nice to get some historical context around something you're studying. I'd recommend checking out some cool graphs about Runge's phenomenon and Chebyshev polynomials.

  • by jansan on 11/27/24, 6:03 PM

    I first cam across the term "Chebyshev polynomials" when working on length parametrization of Bézier curves. Although I still do not know what they really are, I fell in love with the term, because it sounds super smart and is easy to remember. Sometimes when I want to impress non-science people I say "I have to go back to work, those Chebyshev polynomials aren't gonna solve themselves".

  • by throw_m239339 on 11/27/24, 9:55 PM

    I know that name because in Blender there is a Voronoi texture named that way.