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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Did you know (auto-generated) –
- ... that two members of the French parliament were killed when a delayed-action German bomb exploded in the town hall at Bapaume on 25 March 1917?
- ... that in 1940 Xu Ruiyun became the first Chinese woman to receive a PhD in mathematics?
- ... that Ukrainian baritone Danylo Matviienko, who holds a master's degree in mathematics, appeared as Demetrius in Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Oper Frankfurt?
- ... that circle packings in the form of a Doyle spiral were used to model plant growth long before their mathematical investigation by Doyle?
- ... that despite published scholarship to the contrary, Andrew Planta neither received a doctorate nor taught mathematics at Erlangen?
- ... that after Archimedes first defined convex curves, mathematicians lost interest in their analysis until the 19th century, more than two millennia later?
- ... that the music of math rock band Jyocho has been alternatively described as akin to "madness" or "contemplative and melancholy"?
- ... that owner Matthew Benham influenced both Brentford FC in the UK and FC Midtjylland in Denmark to use mathematical modelling to recruit undervalued football players?
More did you know –
- ...that modular arithmetic has application in at least ten different fields of study, including the arts, computer science, and chemistry in addition to mathematics?
- ... that according to Kawasaki's theorem, an origami crease pattern with one vertex may be folded flat if and only if the sum of every other angle between consecutive creases is 180º?
- ... that, in the Rule 90 cellular automaton, any finite pattern eventually fills the whole array of cells with copies of itself?
- ... that, while the criss-cross algorithm visits all eight corners of the Klee–Minty cube when started at a worst corner, it visits only three more corners on average when started at a random corner?
- ...that in senary, all prime numbers other than 2 and 3 end in 1 or a 5?
- ...that, for all prime numbers p, the pth Perrin number is divisible by p?
- ...that it is impossible to trisect a general angle using only a ruler and a compass?
Selected article –
Problem II.8 in the Arithmetica by Diophantus, annotated with Fermat's comment, which became Fermat's Last Theorem Image credit: |
Fermat's Last Theorem is one of the most famous theorems in the history of mathematics. It states that:
- has no solutions in non-zero integers , , and when is an integer greater than 2.
Despite how closely the problem is related to the Pythagorean theorem, which has infinite solutions and hundreds of proofs, Fermat's subtle variation is much more difficult to prove. Still, the problem itself is easily understood even by schoolchildren, making it all the more frustrating and generating perhaps more incorrect proofs than any other problem in the history of mathematics.
The 17th-century mathematician Pierre de Fermat wrote in 1637 in his copy of Bachet's translation of the famous Arithmetica of Diophantus: "I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain." However, no correct proof was found for 357 years, until it was finally proven using very deep methods by Andrew Wiles in 1995 (after a failed attempt a year before). (Full article...)
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