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Mathematical Elegance
Mathematical beauty is the aesthetic pleasure derived from the abstractness, purity, simplicity, depth or orderliness of mathematics. Mathematicians may express this pleasure by describing mathematics (or, at least, some aspect of mathematics) as beautiful or describe mathematics as an art form, e.g., a position taken by G. H. Hardy) or, at a minimum, as a creative activity. Comparisons are made with music and poetry. In method Mathematicians describe an especially pleasing method of proof as ''elegant''. Depending on context, this may mean: * A proof that uses a minimum of additional assumptions or previous results. * A proof that is unusually succinct. * A proof that derives a result in a surprising way (e.g., from an apparently unrelated theorem or a collection of theorems). * A proof that is based on new and original insights. * A method of proof that can be easily generalized to solve a family of similar problems. In the search for an elegant proof, mathematicians oft ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pythagorean Proof (1)
Pythagorean, meaning of or pertaining to the ancient Ionian mathematician, philosopher, and music theorist Pythagoras, may refer to: Philosophy * Pythagoreanism, the esoteric and metaphysical beliefs purported to have been held by Pythagoras * Neo-Pythagoreanism, a school of philosophy reviving Pythagorean doctrines that became prominent in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD * Pythagorean diet, the name for vegetarianism before the nineteenth century Mathematics * Pythagorean theorem * Pythagorean triple * Pythagorean prime * Pythagorean trigonometric identity * Table of Pythagoras, another name for the multiplication table Music * Pythagorean comma * Pythagorean hammers * Pythagorean tuning Other uses * Pythagorean cup * Pythagorean expectation Pythagorean expectation is a sports analytics formula devised by Bill James to estimate the percentage of games a baseball team "should" have won based on the number of runs they scored and allowed. Comparing a team's actual and Pythagore ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deep Result
The language of mathematics has a vast vocabulary of specialist and technical terms. It also has a certain amount of jargon: commonly used phrases which are part of the culture of mathematics, rather than of the subject. Jargon often appears in lectures, and sometimes in print, as informal shorthand for rigorous arguments or precise ideas. Much of this is common English, but with a specific non-obvious meaning when used in a mathematical sense. Some phrases, like "in general", appear below in more than one section. Philosophy of mathematics ; abstract nonsense:A tongue-in-cheek reference to category theory, using which one can employ arguments that establish a (possibly concrete) result without reference to any specifics of the present problem. For that reason, it's also known as ''general abstract nonsense'' or ''generalized abstract nonsense''. ; canonical:A reference to a standard or choice-free presentation of some mathematical object (e.g., canonical map, canonical form, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modular Function
In mathematics, a modular form is a (complex) analytic function on the upper half-plane satisfying a certain kind of functional equation with respect to the group action of the modular group, and also satisfying a growth condition. The theory of modular forms therefore belongs to complex analysis but the main importance of the theory has traditionally been in its connections with number theory. Modular forms appear in other areas, such as algebraic topology, sphere packing, and string theory. A modular function is a function that is invariant with respect to the modular group, but without the condition that be holomorphic in the upper half-plane (among other requirements). Instead, modular functions are meromorphic (that is, they are holomorphic on the complement of a set of isolated points, which are poles of the function). Modular form theory is a special case of the more general theory of automorphic forms which are functions defined on Lie groups which transform nicely wit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monster Group
In the area of abstract algebra known as group theory, the monster group M (also known as the Fischer–Griess monster, or the friendly giant) is the largest sporadic simple group, having order 2463205976112133171923293141475971 = 808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000 ≈ 8. The finite simple groups have been completely classified. Every such group belongs to one of 18 countably infinite families, or is one of 26 sporadic groups that do not follow such a systematic pattern. The monster group contains 20 sporadic groups (including itself) as subquotients. Robert Griess, who proved the existence of the monster in 1982, has called those 20 groups the ''happy family'', and the remaining six exceptions '' pariahs''. It is difficult to give a good constructive definition of the monster because of its complexity. Martin Gardner wrote a popular account of the monster group in his June 1980 Mathematical Games column in ''Scientifi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monstrous Moonshine
In mathematics, monstrous moonshine, or moonshine theory, is the unexpected connection between the monster group ''M'' and modular functions, in particular, the ''j'' function. The term was coined by John Conway and Simon P. Norton in 1979. The monstrous moonshine is now known to be underlain by a vertex operator algebra called the moonshine module (or monster vertex algebra) constructed by Igor Frenkel, James Lepowsky, and Arne Meurman in 1988, which has the monster group as its group of symmetries. This vertex operator algebra is commonly interpreted as a structure underlying a two-dimensional conformal field theory, allowing physics to form a bridge between two mathematical areas. The conjectures made by Conway and Norton were proven by Richard Borcherds for the moonshine module in 1992 using the no-ghost theorem from string theory and the theory of vertex operator algebras and generalized Kac–Moody algebras. History In 1978, John McKay found that the first few ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Langlands
Robert Phelan Langlands, (; born October 6, 1936) is a Canadian mathematician. He is best known as the founder of the Langlands program, a vast web of conjectures and results connecting representation theory and automorphic forms to the study of Galois groups in number theory, for which he received the 2018 Abel Prize. He was an emeritus professor and occupied Albert Einstein's office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, until 2020 when he retired. Career Langlands was born in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada, in 1936 to Robert Langlands and Kathleen J Phelan. He has two younger sisters (Mary b 1938; Sally b 1941). In 1945, his family moved to White Rock, near the US border, where his parents had a building supply and construction business. He graduated from Semiahmoo Secondary School and started enrolling at the University of British Columbia at the age of 16, receiving his undergraduate degree in Mathematics in 1957; he continued at UBC to receive an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrew Wiles
Sir Andrew John Wiles (born 11 April 1953) is an English mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specializing in number theory. He is best known for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, for which he was awarded the 2016 Abel Prize and the 2017 Copley Medal by the Royal Society. He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000, and in 2018, was appointed the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. Wiles is also a 1997 MacArthur Fellow. Education and early life Wiles was born on 11 April 1953 in Cambridge, England, the son of Maurice Frank Wiles (1923–2005) and Patricia Wiles (née Mowll). From 1952-1955, his father worked as the chaplain at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and later became the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford. Wiles attended King's College School, Cambridge, and The Leys School, Cambridge. Wiles states that he came across Fermat's Last Theorem on his way home from sc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wolf Prize
The Wolf Prize is an international award granted in Israel, that has been presented most years since 1978 to living scientists and artists for ''"achievements in the interest of mankind and friendly relations among people ... irrespective of nationality, race, colour, religion, sex or political views."'' History The prize is awarded in Israel by the Wolf Foundation, founded by Ricardo Wolf, a German-born inventor and former Cuban ambassador to Israel. It is awarded in six fields: Agriculture, Chemistry, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, and an Arts prize that rotates between architecture, music, painting, and sculpture. Each prize consists of a diploma and US$100,000. The awards ceremony typically takes place at a session in the Knesset. The prize is described by the Foundation as being "awarded annually", but is not in fact awarded every year: between 2000 and 2010, only six prizes were awarded in most fields, and only four in Physics. The Wolf Prizes in Physics and Chemistry ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modular Form
In mathematics, a modular form is a (complex) analytic function on the upper half-plane satisfying a certain kind of functional equation with respect to the group action of the modular group, and also satisfying a growth condition. The theory of modular forms therefore belongs to complex analysis but the main importance of the theory has traditionally been in its connections with number theory. Modular forms appear in other areas, such as algebraic topology, sphere packing, and string theory. A modular function is a function that is invariant with respect to the modular group, but without the condition that be holomorphic in the upper half-plane (among other requirements). Instead, modular functions are meromorphic (that is, they are holomorphic on the complement of a set of isolated points, which are poles of the function). Modular form theory is a special case of the more general theory of automorphic forms which are functions defined on Lie groups which transform nicely w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elliptic Curve
In mathematics, an elliptic curve is a smooth, projective, algebraic curve of genus one, on which there is a specified point . An elliptic curve is defined over a field and describes points in , the Cartesian product of with itself. If the field's characteristic is different from 2 and 3, then the curve can be described as a plane algebraic curve which consists of solutions for: :y^2 = x^3 + ax + b for some coefficients and in . The curve is required to be non-singular, which means that the curve has no cusps or self-intersections. (This is equivalent to the condition , that is, being square-free in .) It is always understood that the curve is really sitting in the projective plane, with the point being the unique point at infinity. Many sources define an elliptic curve to be simply a curve given by an equation of this form. (When the coefficient field has characteristic 2 or 3, the above equation is not quite general enough to include all non-singular ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modularity Theorem
The modularity theorem (formerly called the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture, Taniyama-Weil conjecture or modularity conjecture for elliptic curves) states that elliptic curves over the field of rational numbers are related to modular forms. Andrew Wiles proved the modularity theorem for semistable elliptic curves, which was enough to imply Fermat's Last Theorem. Later, a series of papers by Wiles's former students Brian Conrad, Fred Diamond and Richard Taylor, culminating in a joint paper with Christophe Breuil, extended Wiles's techniques to prove the full modularity theorem in 2001. Statement The theorem states that any elliptic curve over \mathbf can be obtained via a rational map with integer coefficients from the classical modular curve X_0(N) for some integer N; this is a curve with integer coefficients with an explicit definition. This mapping is called a modular parametrization of level N. If N is the smallest integer for which such a parametrization can be fou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga. Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal '' Physics World'', he was ranked the seventh-greatest physicist of all time. He assisted in the develop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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