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The Princeton Companion To Mathematics
''The Princeton Companion to Mathematics'' is a book providing an extensive overview of mathematics that was published in 2008 by Princeton University Press. Edited by Timothy Gowers with associate editors June Barrow-Green and Imre Leader, it has been noted for the high caliber of its contributors. The book was the 2011 winner of the Euler Book Prize of the Mathematical Association of America, given annually to "an outstanding book about mathematics".......... Topics and organization The book concentrates primarily on modern pure mathematics rather than applied mathematics, although it does also cover both applications of mathematics and the mathematics that relates to those applications; it provides a broad overview of the significant ideas and developments in research mathematics. It is organized into eight parts: *An introduction to mathematics, outlining the major areas of study, key definitions, and the goals and purposes of mathematical research. *An overview of the hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Timothy Gowers
Sir William Timothy Gowers, (; born 20 November 1963) is a British mathematician. He is Professeur titulaire of the Combinatorics chair at the Collège de France, and director of research at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1998, he received the Fields Medal for research connecting the fields of functional analysis and combinatorics. Education Gowers attended King's College School, Cambridge, as a choirboy in the King's College choir, and then Eton College as a King's Scholar, where he was taught mathematics by Norman Routledge. In 1981, Gowers won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad with a perfect score. He completed his PhD, with a dissertation on ''Symmetric Structures in Banach Spaces'' at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1990, supervised by Béla Bollobás. Career and research After his PhD, Gowers was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College. From 1991 until his return to Cambridge in 1995 he w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
London Mathematical Society
The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh Mathematical Society and the Operational Research Society (ORS). History The Society was established on 16 January 1865, the first president being Augustus De Morgan. The earliest meetings were held in University College, but the Society soon moved into Burlington House, Piccadilly. The initial activities of the Society included talks and publication of a journal. The LMS was used as a model for the establishment of the American Mathematical Society in 1888. Mary Cartwright was the first woman to be President of the LMS (in 1961–62). The Society was granted a royal charter in 1965, a century after its foundation. In 1998 the Society moved from rooms in Burlington House into De Morgan House (named after the society's first president), at 57–5 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Transcendental Number Theory
Transcendental number theory is a branch of number theory that investigates transcendental numbers (numbers that are not solutions of any polynomial equation with rational coefficients), in both qualitative and quantitative ways. Transcendence The fundamental theorem of algebra tells us that if we have a non-constant polynomial with rational coefficients (or equivalently, by clearing denominators, with integer coefficients) then that polynomial will have a root in the complex numbers. That is, for any non-constant polynomial P with rational coefficients there will be a complex number \alpha such that P(\alpha)=0. Transcendence theory is concerned with the converse question: given a complex number \alpha, is there a polynomial P with rational coefficients such that P(\alpha)=0? If no such polynomial exists then the number is called transcendental. More generally the theory deals with algebraic independence of numbers. A set of numbers is called algebraically independent ov ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diophantine Approximation
In number theory, the study of Diophantine approximation deals with the approximation of real numbers by rational numbers. It is named after Diophantus of Alexandria. The first problem was to know how well a real number can be approximated by rational numbers. For this problem, a rational number ''a''/''b'' is a "good" approximation of a real number ''α'' if the absolute value of the difference between ''a''/''b'' and ''α'' may not decrease if ''a''/''b'' is replaced by another rational number with a smaller denominator. This problem was solved during the 18th century by means of continued fractions. Knowing the "best" approximations of a given number, the main problem of the field is to find sharp upper and lower bounds of the above difference, expressed as a function of the denominator. It appears that these bounds depend on the nature of the real numbers to be approximated: the lower bound for the approximation of a rational number by another rational number is larger than ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nicolas Bourbaki
Nicolas Bourbaki () is the collective pseudonym of a group of mathematicians, predominantly French alumni of the École normale supérieure - PSL (ENS). Founded in 1934–1935, the Bourbaki group originally intended to prepare a new textbook in analysis. Over time the project became much more ambitious, growing into a large series of textbooks published under the Bourbaki name, meant to treat modern pure mathematics. The series is known collectively as the ''Éléments de mathématique'' (''Elements of Mathematics''), the group's central work. Topics treated in the series include set theory, abstract algebra, topology, analysis, Lie groups and Lie algebras. Bourbaki was founded in response to the effects of the First World War which caused the death of a generation of French mathematicians; as a result, young university instructors were forced to use dated texts. While teaching at the University of Strasbourg, Henri Cartan complained to his colleague André Weil of the inadequac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Halting Problem
In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program–input pairs cannot exist. For any program that might determine whether programs halt, a "pathological" program , called with some input, can pass its own source and its input to ''f'' and then specifically do the opposite of what ''f'' predicts ''g'' will do. No ''f'' can exist that handles this case. A key part of the proof is a mathematical definition of a computer and program, which is known as a Turing machine; the halting problem is '' undecidable'' over Turing machines. It is one of the first cases of decision problems proven to be unsolvable. This proof is significant to practical computing efforts, defining a class of applications which no programming inven ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Birch And Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture
In mathematics, the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture (often called the Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture) describes the set of rational solutions to equations defining an elliptic curve. It is an open problem in the field of number theory and is widely recognized as one of the most challenging mathematical problems. It is named after mathematicians Bryan John Birch and Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who developed the conjecture during the first half of the 1960s with the help of machine computation. , only special cases of the conjecture have been proven. The modern formulation of the conjecture relates arithmetic data associated with an elliptic curve ''E'' over a number field ''K'' to the behaviour of the Hasse–Weil ''L''-function ''L''(''E'', ''s'') of ''E'' at ''s'' = 1. More specifically, it is conjectured that the rank of the abelian group ''E''(''K'') of points of ''E'' is the order of the zero of ''L''(''E'', ''s'') at ''s'' = 1, and the first non ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Four Color Theorem
In mathematics, the four color theorem, or the four color map theorem, states that no more than four colors are required to color the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color. ''Adjacent'' means that two regions share a common boundary curve segment, not merely a corner where three or more regions meet. It was the first major theorem to be proved using a computer. Initially, this proof was not accepted by all mathematicians because the computer-assisted proof was infeasible for a human to check by hand. The proof has gained wide acceptance since then, although some doubters remain. The four color theorem was proved in 1976 by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken after many false proofs and counterexamples (unlike the five color theorem, proved in the 1800s, which states that five colors are enough to color a map). To dispel any remaining doubts about the Appel–Haken proof, a simpler proof using the same ideas and still relying on computers was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Combinatorial Group Theory
In mathematics, combinatorial group theory is the theory of free groups, and the concept of a presentation of a group by generators and relations. It is much used in geometric topology, the fundamental group of a simplicial complex having in a natural and geometric way such a presentation. A very closely related topic is geometric group theory, which today largely subsumes combinatorial group theory, using techniques from outside combinatorics besides. It also comprises a number of algorithmically insoluble problems, most notably the word problem for groups; and the classical Burnside problem. History See for a detailed history of combinatorial group theory. A proto-form is found in the 1856 icosian calculus of William Rowan Hamilton, where he studied the icosahedral symmetry group via the edge graph of the dodecahedron. The foundations of combinatorial group theory were laid by Walther von Dyck, student of Felix Klein Christian Felix Klein (; 25 April 1849 – ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Algebraic Geometry
Algebraic geometry is a branch of mathematics, classically studying zeros of multivariate polynomials. Modern algebraic geometry is based on the use of abstract algebraic techniques, mainly from commutative algebra, for solving geometrical problems about these sets of zeros. The fundamental objects of study in algebraic geometry are algebraic varieties, which are geometric manifestations of solutions of systems of polynomial equations. Examples of the most studied classes of algebraic varieties are: plane algebraic curves, which include lines, circles, parabolas, ellipses, hyperbolas, cubic curves like elliptic curves, and quartic curves like lemniscates and Cassini ovals. A point of the plane belongs to an algebraic curve if its coordinates satisfy a given polynomial equation. Basic questions involve the study of the points of special interest like the singular points, the inflection points and the points at infinity. More advanced questions involve the topo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hilbert Space
In mathematics, Hilbert spaces (named after David Hilbert) allow generalizing the methods of linear algebra and calculus from (finite-dimensional) Euclidean vector spaces to spaces that may be infinite-dimensional. Hilbert spaces arise naturally and frequently in mathematics and physics, typically as function spaces. Formally, a Hilbert space is a vector space equipped with an inner product that defines a distance function for which the space is a complete metric space. The earliest Hilbert spaces were studied from this point of view in the first decade of the 20th century by David Hilbert, Erhard Schmidt, and Frigyes Riesz. They are indispensable tools in the theories of partial differential equations, quantum mechanics, Fourier analysis (which includes applications to signal processing and heat transfer), and ergodic theory (which forms the mathematical underpinning of thermodynamics). John von Neumann coined the term ''Hilbert space'' for the abstract concept ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Expander Graph
In graph theory, an expander graph is a sparse graph that has strong connectivity properties, quantified using vertex, edge or spectral expansion. Expander constructions have spawned research in pure and applied mathematics, with several applications to complexity theory, design of robust computer networks, and the theory of error-correcting codes. Definitions Intuitively, an expander graph is a finite, undirected multigraph in which every subset of the vertices that is not "too large" has a "large" boundary. Different formalisations of these notions give rise to different notions of expanders: ''edge expanders'', ''vertex expanders'', and ''spectral expanders'', as defined below. A disconnected graph is not an expander, since the boundary of a connected component is empty. Every connected graph is an expander; however, different connected graphs have different expansion parameters. The complete graph has the best expansion property, but it has largest possible degree. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
