Willebrord Snell died 400 years ago today, aged 46. He had derived the law of refraction in 1621 but never published it. Descartes printed it in 1637, and in France the law still carries Descartes's name. Snell's own derivation didn't appear in print until 1703, 82 years after he

Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary · 2026-10-30

$Willebrord Snell died 400 years ago today, aged 46. He had derived the law of refraction in 1621 bu…$

更多来自 @fermatslibrary

#1
The Tragedy of the Commons - why would rational people destroy the one thing they all depend on? Garrett Hardin’s 1968 answer: on a shared pasture, each extra cow pays its owner i…
Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary · 17 小时前
#2
Happy Birthday Carl Sagan 🎂 When asked about the the purpose of sending messages out into the universe when it might take thousands of years to get any sort of answer Carl Sagan s…
Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary · 2 天前
#3
Marie Curie (1867) and Lise Meitner (1878) were born 11 years apart on the same day: November 7. Curie won 2 Nobel Prizes. Meitner was nominated 48 times: 29 in physics, 19 in che…
Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary · 4 天前
#4
Discovery of explicit solution formulas for Polynomial equation: • j=2 Pythagoras (500 BC) • j=3 Girolamo Cardano (1545) • j=4 Lodovico Ferrari (1540) • j≥5 No general formula exi…
Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary · 5 天前
#5
James Clerk Maxwell died exactly 147 years ago today, aged 48 of the same abdominal cancer that had killed his mother at the same age, when he was 8 years old. That same year Albe…
Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary · 6 天前
#6
The first measurement showing light has a finite speed. In this paper from 1676 Ole Rømer proved that light doesn't travel instantly using Jupiter's moon Io as a clock in the sky.…
Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary · 2026-11-03

查看 @fermatslibrary 的全部帖子