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Tangloids
Tangloids is a mathematical game for two players created by Piet Hein to model the calculus of spinors. A description of the game appeared in the book ''"Martin Gardner's New Mathematical Diversions from Scientific American"'' by Martin Gardner from 1996 in a section on the mathematics of braiding.M. Gardner''Sphere Packing, Lewis Carroll, and Reversi: Martin Gardner's New Mathematical Diversions'', Cambridge University Press, September, 2009, Two flat blocks of wood each pierced with three small holes are joined with three parallel strings. Each player holds one of the blocks of wood. The first player holds one block of wood still, while the other player rotates the other block of wood for two full revolutions. The plane of rotation is perpendicular to the strings when not tangled. The strings now overlap each other. Then the first player tries to untangle the strings without rotating either piece of wood. Only translations (moving the pieces without rotating) are allowed. Aft ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tangloids
Tangloids is a mathematical game for two players created by Piet Hein to model the calculus of spinors. A description of the game appeared in the book ''"Martin Gardner's New Mathematical Diversions from Scientific American"'' by Martin Gardner from 1996 in a section on the mathematics of braiding.M. Gardner''Sphere Packing, Lewis Carroll, and Reversi: Martin Gardner's New Mathematical Diversions'', Cambridge University Press, September, 2009, Two flat blocks of wood each pierced with three small holes are joined with three parallel strings. Each player holds one of the blocks of wood. The first player holds one block of wood still, while the other player rotates the other block of wood for two full revolutions. The plane of rotation is perpendicular to the strings when not tangled. The strings now overlap each other. Then the first player tries to untangle the strings without rotating either piece of wood. Only translations (moving the pieces without rotating) are allowed. Aft ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Piet Hein (Denmark)
Piet Hein (16 December 1905 – 17 April 1996) was a Danish polymath (mathematician, inventor, designer, writer and poet), often writing under the Old Norse pseudonym Kumbel, meaning " tombstone". His short poems, known as '' gruks'' or grooks ( da, gruk), first started to appear in the daily newspaper ''Politiken'' shortly after the German occupation of Denmark in April 1940 under the pseudonym "Kumbel Kumbell". He also invented the Soma cube and the board game Hex. Biography Hein, a direct descendant of Piet Pieterszoon Hein, the 17th century Dutch naval hero, was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He studied at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (later to become the Niels Bohr Institute) of the University of Copenhagen, and Technical University of Denmark. Yale awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1972. He died in his home on Funen, Denmark in 1996. Resistance Piet Hein, who, in his own words, "played mental ping-pong" with Niels Bohr in the inter-War period, found himself con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orientation Entanglement
In mathematics and physics, the notion of orientation entanglement is sometimes used to develop intuition relating to the geometry of spinors or alternatively as a concrete realization of the failure of the special orthogonal groups to be simply connected. Elementary description Spatial vectors alone are not sufficient to describe fully the properties of rotations in space. Consider the following example. A coffee cup is suspended in a room by a pair of elastic rubber bands fixed to the walls of the room. The cup is rotated by its handle through a full twist of 360°, so that the handle is brought all the way around the central vertical axis of the cup and back to its original position. Note that after this rotation, the cup has been returned to its original orientation, but that its orientation with respect to the walls is ''twisted''. In other words, if we lower the coffee cup to the floor of the room, the two bands will coil around each other in one full twist of a double ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spinor
In geometry and physics, spinors are elements of a complex vector space that can be associated with Euclidean space. Like geometric vectors and more general tensors, spinors transform linearly when the Euclidean space is subjected to a slight (infinitesimal) rotation. Unlike vectors and tensors, a spinor transforms to its negative when the space is continuously rotated through a complete turn from 0° to 360° (see picture). This property characterizes spinors: spinors can be viewed as the "square roots" of vectors (although this is inaccurate and may be misleading; they are better viewed as "square roots" of sections of vector bundles – in the case of the exterior algebra bundle of the cotangent bundle, they thus become "square roots" of differential forms). It is also possible to associate a substantially similar notion of spinor to Minkowski space, in which case the Lorentz transformations of special relativity play the role of rotations. Spinors were introduced in geome ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Balinese Cup Trick
In mathematics and physics, the plate trick, also known as Dirac's string trick, the belt trick, or the Balinese cup trick, is any of several demonstrations of the idea that rotating an object with strings attached to it by 360 degrees does not return the system to its original state, while a second rotation of 360 degrees, a total rotation of 720 degrees, does. Mathematically, it is a demonstration of the theorem that SU(2) (which double-covers SO(3)) is simply connected. To say that SU(2) double-covers SO(3) essentially means that the unit quaternions represent the group of rotations twice over. A detailed, intuitive, yet semi-formal articulation can be found in the article on tangloids. Demonstrations Resting a small plate flat on the palm, it is possible to perform two rotations of one's hand while keeping the plate upright. After the first rotation of the hand, the arm will be twisted, but after the second rotation it will end in the original position. To do this, the hand m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
3-sphere
In mathematics, a 3-sphere is a higher-dimensional analogue of a sphere. It may be embedded in 4-dimensional Euclidean space as the set of points equidistant from a fixed central point. Analogous to how the boundary of a ball in three dimensions is an ordinary sphere (or 2-sphere, a two-dimensional surface), the boundary of a ball in four dimensions is a 3-sphere (an object with three dimensions). A 3-sphere is an example of a 3-manifold and an ''n''-sphere. Definition In coordinates, a 3-sphere with center and radius is the set of all points in real, 4-dimensional space () such that :\sum_^3(x_i - C_i)^2 = ( x_0 - C_0 )^2 + ( x_1 - C_1 )^2 + ( x_2 - C_2 )^2+ ( x_3 - C_3 )^2 = r^2. The 3-sphere centered at the origin with radius 1 is called the unit 3-sphere and is usually denoted : :S^3 = \left\. It is often convenient to regard as the space with 2 complex dimensions () or the quaternions (). The unit 3-sphere is then given by :S^3 = \left\ or :S^3 = \left\. This ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Euclidean Space
Euclidean space is the fundamental space of geometry, intended to represent physical space. Originally, that is, in Euclid's Elements, Euclid's ''Elements'', it was the three-dimensional space of Euclidean geometry, but in modern mathematics there are Euclidean spaces of any positive integer dimension (mathematics), dimension, including the three-dimensional space and the ''Euclidean plane'' (dimension two). The qualifier "Euclidean" is used to distinguish Euclidean spaces from other spaces that were later considered in physics and modern mathematics. Ancient History of geometry#Greek geometry, Greek geometers introduced Euclidean space for modeling the physical space. Their work was collected by the Greek mathematics, ancient Greek mathematician Euclid in his ''Elements'', with the great innovation of ''mathematical proof, proving'' all properties of the space as theorems, by starting from a few fundamental properties, called ''postulates'', which either were considered as eviden ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manifold (mathematics)
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n-dimensional manifold, or ''n-manifold'' for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to an open subset of n-dimensional Euclidean space. One-dimensional manifolds include lines and circles, but not lemniscates. Two-dimensional manifolds are also called surfaces. Examples include the plane, the sphere, and the torus, and also the Klein bottle and real projective plane. The concept of a manifold is central to many parts of geometry and modern mathematical physics because it allows complicated structures to be described in terms of well-understood topological properties of simpler spaces. Manifolds naturally arise as solution sets of systems of equations and as graphs of functions. The concept has applications in computer-graphics given the need to associate pictures with coordinates (e.g. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sphere
A sphere () is a Geometry, geometrical object that is a solid geometry, three-dimensional analogue to a two-dimensional circle. A sphere is the Locus (mathematics), set of points that are all at the same distance from a given point in three-dimensional space.. That given point is the centre (geometry), centre of the sphere, and is the sphere's radius. The earliest known mentions of spheres appear in the work of the Greek mathematics, ancient Greek mathematicians. The sphere is a fundamental object in many fields of mathematics. Spheres and nearly-spherical shapes also appear in nature and industry. Bubble (physics), Bubbles such as soap bubbles take a spherical shape in equilibrium. spherical Earth, The Earth is often approximated as a sphere in geography, and the celestial sphere is an important concept in astronomy. Manufactured items including pressure vessels and most curved mirrors and lenses are based on spheres. Spheres rolling, roll smoothly in any direction, so mos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flat Earth
The flat-Earth model is an archaic and scientifically disproven conception of Earth's shape as a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat-Earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period (5th century BC), the Bronze and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period (31 BC), and China until the 17th century. The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in ancient Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC). However, most pre-Socratics (6th–5th century BC) retained the flat-Earth model. In the early 4th century BC, Plato wrote about a spherical Earth. By about 330 BC, his former student Aristotle had provided strong empirical evidence for a spherical Earth. Knowledge of the Earth's global shape gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world. By the early period of the Christian Church, the spherical view was widely held, with some notable exceptions. It is a historical myth or modern misconception that medieval ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mathematical Game
A mathematical game is a game whose rules, strategies, and outcomes are defined by clear mathematical parameters. Often, such games have simple rules and match procedures, such as Tic-tac-toe and Dots and Boxes. Generally, mathematical games need not be conceptually intricate to involve deeper computational underpinnings. For example, even though the rules of Mancala are relatively basic, the game can be rigorously analyzed through the lens of combinatorial game theory. Mathematical games differ sharply from mathematical puzzles in that mathematical puzzles require specific mathematical expertise to complete, whereas mathematical games do not require a deep knowledge of mathematics to play. Often, the arithmetic core of mathematical games is not readily apparent to players untrained to note the statistical or mathematical aspects. Some mathematical games are of deep interest in the field of recreational mathematics. When studying a game's core mathematics, arithmetic theory i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Identity (mathematics)
In mathematics, an identity is an equality relating one mathematical expression ''A'' to another mathematical expression ''B'', such that ''A'' and ''B'' (which might contain some variables) produce the same value for all values of the variables within a certain range of validity. In other words, ''A'' = ''B'' is an identity if ''A'' and ''B'' define the same functions, and an identity is an equality between functions that are differently defined. For example, (a+b)^2 = a^2 + 2ab + b^2 and \cos^2\theta + \sin^2\theta =1 are identities. Identities are sometimes indicated by the triple bar symbol instead of , the equals sign. Common identities Algebraic identities Certain identities, such as a+0=a and a+(-a)=0, form the basis of algebra, while other identities, such as (a+b)^2 = a^2 + 2ab +b^2 and a^2 - b^2 = (a+b)(a-b), can be useful in simplifying algebraic expressions and expanding them. Trigonometric identities Geometrically, trigonometric ide ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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