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 more than 60 scientific papers authored by mathematician Paul Erdős were published posthumously?
- ... that people in Madagascar perform algebra on tree seeds in order to tell the future?
- ... that the prologue to The Polymath was written by Martin Kemp, a leading expert on Leonardo da Vinci?
- ... that Arithmetic was the first mathematics text book written in the Russian language?
- ... that a folded paper lantern shows that certain mathematical definitions of surface area are incorrect?
- ... that Fairleigh Dickinson's upset victory over Purdue was the biggest upset in terms of point spread in NCAA tournament history, with Purdue being a 23+1⁄2-point favorite?
- ... that Donn Piatt threw his mathematics teacher out of the window?
- ... that in 1940 Xu Ruiyun became the first Chinese woman to receive a PhD in mathematics?
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- ... that economists blame market failures on non-convexity?
- ... that, according to the pizza theorem, a circular pizza that is sliced off-center into eight equal-angled wedges can still be divided equally between two people?
- ... that the clique problem of programming a computer to find complete subgraphs in an undirected graph was first studied as a way to find groups of people who all know each other in social networks?
- ... that the Herschel graph is the smallest possible polyhedral graph that does not have a Hamiltonian cycle?
- ... that the Life without Death cellular automaton, a mathematical model of pattern formation, is a variant of Conway's Game of Life in which cells, once brought to life, never die?
- ... 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?
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Carl Friedrich Gauss Image credit: C.A. Jensen (1792-1870) |
Carl Friedrich Gauss (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician and scientist of profound genius who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, electricity, magnetism, astronomy and optics. Known as "the prince of mathematicians" and "greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had a remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked as one of history's most influential mathematicians.
Gauss was a child prodigy, of whom there are many anecdotes pertaining to his astounding precocity while a mere toddler, and made his first ground-breaking mathematical discoveries while still a teenager. He completed Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, his magnum opus, at the age of twenty-one (1798), though it wasn't published until 1801. This work was fundamental in consolidating number theory as a discipline and has shaped the field to the present day. (Full article...)
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