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Conway Chained Arrow Notation
Conway chained arrow notation, created by mathematician John Horton Conway, is a means of expressing certain extremely large numbers. It is simply a finite sequence of positive integers separated by rightward arrows, e.g. 2\to3\to4\to5\to6. As with most combinatorial notations, the definition is recursive. In this case the notation eventually resolves to being the leftmost number raised to some (usually enormous) integer power. Definition and overview A "Conway chain" is defined as follows: * Any positive integer is a chain of length 1. * A chain of length ''n'', followed by a right-arrow → and a positive integer, together form a chain of length n+1. Any chain represents an integer, according to the six rules below. Two chains are said to be equivalent if they represent the same integer. Let a, b, c denote positive integers and let \# denote the unchanged remainder of the chain. Then: #An empty chain (or a chain of length 0) is equal to 1 #The chain p represents the number p. # ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Horton Conway
John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branches of recreational mathematics, most notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life. Born and raised in Liverpool, Conway spent the first half of his career at the University of Cambridge before moving to the United States, where he held the John von Neumann Professorship at Princeton University for the rest of his career. On 11 April 2020, at age 82, he died of complications from COVID-19. Early life and education Conway was born on 26 December 1937 in Liverpool, the son of Cyril Horton Conway and Agnes Boyce. He became interested in mathematics at a very early age. By the time he was 11, his ambition was to become a mathematician. After leaving sixth form, he studied mathematics at Gonville and Caius College, Camb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Function Composition
In mathematics, function composition is an operation that takes two functions and , and produces a function such that . In this operation, the function is applied to the result of applying the function to . That is, the functions and are composed to yield a function that maps in domain to in codomain . Intuitively, if is a function of , and is a function of , then is a function of . The resulting ''composite'' function is denoted , defined by for all in . The notation is read as " of ", " after ", " circle ", " round ", " about ", " composed with ", " following ", " then ", or " on ", or "the composition of and ". Intuitively, composing functions is a chaining process in which the output of function feeds the input of function . The composition of functions is a special case of the composition of relations, sometimes also denoted by \circ. As a result, all properties of composition of relations are true of composition of functions, such as the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Large Numbers
Large numbers are numbers significantly larger than those typically used in everyday life (for instance in simple counting or in monetary transactions), appearing frequently in fields such as mathematics, cosmology, cryptography, and statistical mechanics. They are typically large positive integers, or more generally, large positive real numbers, but may also be other numbers in other contexts. Googology is the study of nomenclature and properties of large numbers. In the everyday world Scientific notation was created to handle the wide range of values that occur in scientific study. 1.0 × 109, for example, means one billion, or a 1 followed by nine zeros: 1 000 000 000. The reciprocal, 1.0 × 10−9, means one billionth, or 0.000 000 001. Writing 109 instead of nine zeros saves readers the effort and hazard of counting a long series of zeros to see how large the number is. Examples of large numbers describing everyday real-world objects include: * The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steinhaus–Moser Notation
In mathematics, Steinhaus–Moser notation is a notation for expressing certain large numbers. It is an extension (devised by Leo Moser) of Hugo Steinhaus's polygon notation. Definitions : 20px, n in a triangle a number in a triangle means nn. : 20px, n in a square a number in a square is equivalent to "the number inside triangles, which are all nested." : 20px, n in a pentagon a number in a pentagon is equivalent with "the number inside squares, which are all nested." etc.: written in an ()-sided polygon is equivalent with "the number inside nested -sided polygons". In a series of nested polygons, they are associated inward. The number inside two triangles is equivalent to nn inside one triangle, which is equivalent to nn raised to the power of nn. Steinhaus defined only the triangle, the square, and the circle 20px, n in a circle, which is equivalent to the pentagon defined above. Special values Steinhaus defined: *mega is the number equivalent to 2 in a c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Strictly Increasing
In mathematics, a monotonic function (or monotone function) is a function between ordered sets that preserves or reverses the given order. This concept first arose in calculus, and was later generalized to the more abstract setting of order theory. In calculus and analysis In calculus, a function f defined on a subset of the real numbers with real values is called ''monotonic'' if and only if it is either entirely non-increasing, or entirely non-decreasing. That is, as per Fig. 1, a function that increases monotonically does not exclusively have to increase, it simply must not decrease. A function is called ''monotonically increasing'' (also ''increasing'' or ''non-decreasing'') if for all x and y such that x \leq y one has f\!\left(x\right) \leq f\!\left(y\right), so f preserves the order (see Figure 1). Likewise, a function is called ''monotonically decreasing'' (also ''decreasing'' or ''non-increasing'') if, whenever x \leq y, then f\!\left(x\right) \geq f\!\left(y\ri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Graham's Number
Graham's number is an immense number that arose as an upper bound on the answer of a problem in the mathematical field of Ramsey theory. It is much larger than many other large numbers such as Skewes's number and Moser's number, both of which are in turn much larger than a googolplex. As with these, it is so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space. But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Graham's number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe. Nor even can the number of digits of ''that'' number—and so forth, for a number of times far exceeding the total number of Planck volumes in the observable universe. Thus Graham's number cannot be expressed even by physical universe-scale power towers of the form a ^. How ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hyperoperation
In mathematics, the hyperoperation sequence is an infinite sequence of arithmetic operations (called ''hyperoperations'' in this context) that starts with a unary operation (the successor function with ''n'' = 0). The sequence continues with the binary operations of addition (''n'' = 1), multiplication (''n'' = 2), and exponentiation (''n'' = 3). After that, the sequence proceeds with further binary operations extending beyond exponentiation, using right-associativity. For the operations beyond exponentiation, the ''n''th member of this sequence is named by Reuben Goodstein after the Greek prefix of ''n'' suffixed with ''-ation'' (such as tetration (''n'' = 4), pentation (''n'' = 5), hexation (''n'' = 6), etc.) and can be written as using ''n'' − 2 arrows in Knuth's up-arrow notation. Each hyperoperation may be understood recursively in terms of the previous one by: :a = \underbrace_,\quad n \ge 2 It may also be defined according to the recursion rule part of the de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ackermann Function
In computability theory, the Ackermann function, named after Wilhelm Ackermann, is one of the simplest and earliest-discovered examples of a total computable function that is not primitive recursive. All primitive recursive functions are total and computable, but the Ackermann function illustrates that not all total computable functions are primitive recursive. After Ackermann's publication of his function (which had three non-negative integer arguments), many authors modified it to suit various purposes, so that today "the Ackermann function" may refer to any of numerous variants of the original function. One common version, the two-argument Ackermann–Péter function is defined as follows for nonnegative integers ''m'' and ''n'': : \begin \operatorname(0, n) & = & n + 1 \\ \operatorname(m+1, 0) & = & \operatorname(m, 1) \\ \operatorname(m+1, n+1) & = & \operatorname(m, \operatorname(m+1, n)) \end Its value grows rapidly, even for small inputs. For example, is an integer o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tetration
In mathematics, tetration (or hyper-4) is an operation based on iterated, or repeated, exponentiation. There is no standard notation for tetration, though \uparrow \uparrow and the left-exponent ''xb'' are common. Under the definition as repeated exponentiation, means , where ' copies of ' are iterated via exponentiation, right-to-left, i.e. the application of exponentiation n-1 times. ' is called the "height" of the function, while ' is called the "base," analogous to exponentiation. It would be read as "the th tetration of ". It is the next hyperoperation after exponentiation, but before pentation. The word was coined by Reuben Louis Goodstein from tetra- (four) and iteration. Tetration is also defined recursively as : := \begin 1 &\textn=0, \\ a^ &\textn>0, \end allowing for attempts to extend tetration to non-natural numbers such as real and complex numbers. The two inverses of tetration are called super-root and super-logarithm, analogous to the nth root and the log ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Large Numbers
Large numbers are numbers significantly larger than those typically used in everyday life (for instance in simple counting or in monetary transactions), appearing frequently in fields such as mathematics, cosmology, cryptography, and statistical mechanics. They are typically large positive integers, or more generally, large positive real numbers, but may also be other numbers in other contexts. Googology is the study of nomenclature and properties of large numbers. In the everyday world Scientific notation was created to handle the wide range of values that occur in scientific study. 1.0 × 109, for example, means one billion, or a 1 followed by nine zeros: 1 000 000 000. The reciprocal, 1.0 × 10−9, means one billionth, or 0.000 000 001. Writing 109 instead of nine zeros saves readers the effort and hazard of counting a long series of zeros to see how large the number is. Examples of large numbers describing everyday real-world objects include: * The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms". He is the author of the multi-volume work ''The Art of Computer Programming'' and contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it. In the process, he also popularized the asymptotic notation. In addition to fundamental contributions in several branches of theoretical computer science, Knuth is the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system, the related METAFONT font definition language and rendering system, and the Computer Modern family of typefaces. As a writer and scholar, Knuth created the WEB and CWEB computer programming systems designed to encou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Associativity
In mathematics, the associative property is a property of some binary operations, which means that rearranging the parentheses in an expression will not change the result. In propositional logic, associativity is a valid rule of replacement for expressions in logical proofs. Within an expression containing two or more occurrences in a row of the same associative operator, the order in which the operations are performed does not matter as long as the sequence of the operands is not changed. That is (after rewriting the expression with parentheses and in infix notation if necessary), rearranging the parentheses in such an expression will not change its value. Consider the following equations: \begin (2 + 3) + 4 &= 2 + (3 + 4) = 9 \,\\ 2 \times (3 \times 4) &= (2 \times 3) \times 4 = 24 . \end Even though the parentheses were rearranged on each line, the values of the expressions were not altered. Since this holds true when performing addition and multiplication on any real ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
