Chebyshev Polynomials in the 16th Century (2022)

Kind of off topic, but look at how beautiful the ar5iv link is:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ar5iv.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;2203.10955" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ar5iv.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;2203.10955</a><p>I am getting more and more excited about converting TeX sources to HTML5 to be more accessible to students and researchers.<p>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.

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

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.

Ah cool to see this on HN! I&#x27;m taking a numerical calc class right now and it&#x27;s nice to get some historical context around something you&#x27;re studying. I&#x27;d recommend checking out some cool graphs about Runge&#x27;s phenomenon and Chebyshev polynomials.

I first cam across the term &quot;Chebyshev polynomials&quot; 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 &quot;I have to go back to work, those Chebyshev polynomials aren&#x27;t gonna solve themselves&quot;.

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