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 subgroup distortion theory, introduced by Misha Gromov in 1993, can help encode text?
- ... that multiple mathematics competitions have made use of Sophie Germain's identity?
- ... that the prologue to The Polymath was written by Martin Kemp, a leading expert on Leonardo da Vinci?
- ... 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 after Archimedes first defined convex curves, mathematicians lost interest in their analysis until the 19th century, more than two millennia later?
- ... that mathematician Mathias Metternich was one of the founders of the Jacobin club of the Republic of Mainz?
- ... that in the aftermath of the American Civil War, the only Black-led organization providing teachers to formerly enslaved people was the African Civilization Society?
- ... that ten-sided gaming dice have kite-shaped faces?
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- ...the hyperbolic trigonometric functions of the natural logarithm can be represented by rational algebraic fractions?
- ... 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?
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In this shear transformation of the Mona Lisa, the central vertical axis (red vector) is unchanged, but the diagonal vector (blue) has changed direction. Hence the red vector is said to be an eigenvector of this particular transformation and the blue vector is not. Image credit: User:Voyajer |
In mathematics, an eigenvector of a transformation is a vector, different from the zero vector, which that transformation simply multiplies by a constant factor, called the eigenvalue of that vector. Often, a transformation is completely described by its eigenvalues and eigenvectors. The eigenspace for a factor is the set of eigenvectors with that factor as eigenvalue, together with the zero vector.
In the specific case of linear algebra, the eigenvalue problem is this: given an n by n matrix A, what nonzero vectors x in exist, such that Ax is a scalar multiple of x?
The scalar multiple is denoted by the Greek letter λ and is called an eigenvalue of the matrix A, while x is called the eigenvector of A corresponding to λ. These concepts play a major role in several branches of both pure and applied mathematics — appearing prominently in linear algebra, functional analysis, and to a lesser extent in nonlinear situations.
It is common to prefix any natural name for the vector with eigen instead of saying eigenvector. For example, eigenfunction if the eigenvector is a function, eigenmode if the eigenvector is a harmonic mode, eigenstate if the eigenvector is a quantum state, and so on. Similarly for the eigenvalue, e.g. eigenfrequency if the eigenvalue is (or determines) a frequency. (Full article...)
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