Portal:Mathematics
The Mathematics Portal
Mathematics is the study of representing and reasoning about abstract objects (such as numbers, points, spaces, sets, structures, and games). Mathematics is used throughout the world as an essential tool in many fields, including natural science, engineering, medicine, and the social sciences. Applied mathematics, the branch of mathematics concerned with application of mathematical knowledge to other fields, inspires and makes use of new mathematical discoveries and sometimes leads to the development of entirely new mathematical disciplines, such as statistics and game theory. Mathematicians also engage in pure mathematics, or mathematics for its own sake, without having any application in mind. There is no clear line separating pure and applied mathematics, and practical applications for what began as pure mathematics are often discovered. (Full article...)
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- ... that museum director Alena Aladava rebuilt the Belarusian national art collection in the aftermath of the Second World War?
- ... that after Florida schools banned 54 mathematics books, Chaz Stevens petitioned that they also ban the Bible?
- ... that the mathematical infinity symbol ∞ may be derived from the Roman numerals for 1000 or for 100 million?
- ... that the word algebra is derived from an Arabic term for the surgical treatment of bonesetting?
- ... that subgroup distortion theory, introduced by Misha Gromov in 1993, can help encode text?
- ... that after Archimedes first defined convex curves, mathematicians lost interest in their analysis until the 19th century, more than two millennia later?
- ... that a folded paper lantern shows that certain mathematical definitions of surface area are incorrect?
- ... that despite a mathematical model deeming the ice cream bar flavour Goody Goody Gum Drops impossible, it was still created?
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- ...that an arbitrary quadrilateral will tessellate?
- ...that it has not been proven whether or not every even integer greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two primes?
- ...that the sum of the first n odd numbers divided by the sum of the next n odd numbers is always equal to one third?
- ...that i to the power of i, where i is the square root of -1, is a real number?
- ...an infinite, nonrepeating decimal can be represented using only the number 1 using continued fractions?
- ...that 253931039382791 and the following 18 prime numbers all end in the digit 1?
- ...that the Electronic Frontier Foundation funds awards for the discovery of prime numbers beyond certain sizes?
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Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor (December 3, 1845, St. Petersburg, Russia – January 6, 1918, Halle, Germany) was a German mathematician who is best known as the creator of set theory. Cantor established the importance of one-to-one correspondence between sets, defined infinite and well-ordered sets, and proved that the real numbers are "more numerous" than the natural numbers. In fact, Cantor's theorem implies the existence of an "infinity of infinities." He defined the cardinal and ordinal numbers, and their arithmetic. Cantor's work is of great philosophical interest, a fact of which he was well aware.
Cantor's work encountered resistance from mathematical contemporaries such as Leopold Kronecker and Henri Poincaré, and later from Hermann Weyl and L.E.J. Brouwer. Ludwig Wittgenstein raised philosophical objections. Nowadays, the vast majority of mathematicians who are neither constructivists nor finitists accept Cantor's work on transfinite sets and arithmetic, recognizing it as a major paradigm shift. (Full article...)
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