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 circle packings in the form of a Doyle spiral were used to model plant growth long before their mathematical investigation by Doyle?
- ... that ten-sided gaming dice have kite-shaped faces?
- ... that multiple mathematics competitions have made use of Sophie Germain's identity?
- ... that Fathimath Dheema Ali is the first Olympic qualifier from the Maldives?
- ... that the discovery of Descartes' theorem in geometry came from a too-difficult mathematics problem posed to a princess?
- ... that the word algebra is derived from an Arabic term for the surgical treatment of bonesetting?
- ... that after Archimedes first defined convex curves, mathematicians lost interest in their analysis until the 19th century, more than two millennia later?
- ... 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?
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- ... that one can list every positive rational number without repetition by breadth-first traversal of the Calkin–Wilf tree?
- ... that the Hadwiger conjecture implies that the external surface of any three-dimensional convex body can be illuminated by only eight light sources, but the best proven bound is that 16 lights are sufficient?
- ... that an equitable coloring of a graph, in which the numbers of vertices of each color are as nearly equal as possible, may require far more colors than a graph coloring without this constraint?
- ... that no matter how biased a coin one uses, flipping a coin to determine whether each edge is present or absent in a countably infinite graph will always produce the same graph, the Rado graph?
- ...that it is possible to stack identical dominoes off the edge of a table to create an arbitrarily large overhang?
- ...that in Floyd's algorithm for cycle detection, the tortoise and hare move at very different speeds, but always finish at the same spot?
- ...that in graph theory, a pseudoforest can contain trees and pseudotrees, but cannot contain any butterflies, diamonds, handcuffs, or bicycles?
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3D illustration of a stereographic projection from the north pole onto a plane below the sphere. Image credit: Mark Howison |
In geometry, the stereographic projection is a particular mapping (function) that projects a sphere onto a plane. The projection is defined on the entire sphere, except at one point: the projection point. Where it is defined, the mapping is smooth and bijective. It is conformal, meaning that it preserves angles. It is neither isometric nor area-preserving: that is, it preserves neither distances nor the areas of figures.
Intuitively, then, the stereographic projection is a way of picturing the sphere as the plane, with some inevitable compromises. Because the sphere and the plane appear in many areas of mathematics and its applications, so does the stereographic projection; it finds use in diverse fields including complex analysis, cartography, geology, and photography. (Full article...)
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