Posts Tagged ‘geometry’
“Topology is precisely the mathematical discipline that allows the passage from local to global”*…
Jordana Cepelewicz on two new topographical results that bring some order to the confoundingly difficult study of four-dimensional shapes…
The central objects of study in topology are spaces called manifolds, which look flat when you zoom in on them. The surface of a sphere, for instance, is a two-dimensional manifold. Topologists understand such two-dimensional manifolds very well. And they have developed tools that let them make sense of three-dimensional manifolds and those with five or more dimensions.
But in four dimensions, “everything goes a bit crazy,” said Sam Hughes, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. Tools stop working; exotic behavior emerges. As Tom Mrowka of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explained, “There’s just enough room to have interesting phenomena, but not so much room that they fall apart.”
In the early 1990s, Mrowka and Peter Kronheimer of Harvard University were studying how two-dimensional surfaces can be embedded within four-dimensional manifolds. They developed new techniques to characterize these surfaces, allowing them to gain crucial insights into the otherwise inaccessible structure of four-dimensional manifolds. Their findings suggested that the members of a broad class of surfaces all slice through their parent manifold in a relatively simple way, leaving a fundamental property unchanged. But nobody could prove this was always true.
In February, together with Daniel Ruberman of Brandeis University, Hughes constructed a sequence of counterexamples — “crazy” two-dimensional surfaces that dissect their parent manifolds in ways that mathematicians had believed to be impossible. The counterexamples show that four-dimensional manifolds are even more remarkably diverse than mathematicians in earlier decades had realized. “It’s really a beautiful paper,” Mrowka said. “I just keep looking at it. There’s lots of delicious little things there.”
Late last year, Ruberman helped organize a conference that created a new list of the most significant open problems in low-dimensional topology. In preparing for it, he looked at a previous list of important unsolved topological problems from 1997. It included a question that Kronheimer had posed based on his work with Mrowka. “It was in there, and I think it was a little bit forgotten,” Ruberman said. Now he thought he could answer it…
Read on for the details: “Mathematicians Marvel at ‘Crazy’ Cuts Through Four Dimensions,” from @jordanacep in @QuantaMagazine.
* Rene Thom
###
As we savor surprising shapes, we might send carefully-modeled birthday greetings to William Bowie; he was born on this date in 1872. A geodetic engineer who joined the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1895, he investigated isostasy (a principle that dense crustal rocks to tend cause topographic depressions and light crustal rocks cause topographic elevations).
Bowie was the first President of the American Geophysical Union from 1920 to 1922 and served as president a second time from 1929 to 1932. The William Bowie Medal, the highest honor of the AGU, is named in his honor.
“The control of large numbers is possible, and like unto that of small numbers, if we subdivide them”*…
It’s always been intuitively obvious that we handle small numbers more easily than large ones. But the discovery that the brain has different systems for representing small and large numbers provokes new questions about memory, attention, and mathematics…
More than 150 years ago, the economist and philosopher William Stanley Jevons discovered something curious about the number 4. While musing about how the mind conceives of numbers, he tossed a handful of black beans into a cardboard box. Then, after a fleeting glance, he guessed how many there were, before counting them to record the true value. After more than 1,000 trials, he saw a clear pattern. When there were four or fewer beans in the box, he always guessed the right number. But for five beans or more, his quick estimations were often incorrect.
Jevons’ description of his self-experiment, published in Nature in 1871, set the “foundation of how we think about numbers,” said Steven Piantadosi, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. It sparked a long-lasting and ongoing debate about why there seems to be a limit on the number of items we can accurately judge to be present in a set.
Now, a new study in Nature Human Behaviour has edged closer to an answer by taking an unprecedented look at how human brain cells fire when presented with certain quantities. Its findings suggest that the brain uses a combination of two mechanisms to judge how many objects it sees. One estimates quantities. The second sharpens the accuracy of those estimates — but only for small numbers…
Although the new study does not end the debate, the findings start to untangle the biological basis for how the brain judges quantities, which could inform bigger questions about memory, attention and even mathematics…
One, two, three, four… and more: “Why the Human Brain Perceives Small Numbers Better,” from @QuantaMagazine.
* Sun Tzu
###
As we stew over scale, we might spare a thought for a man untroubled by larger (and more complicated) numbers, Émile Picard; he died on this date in 1941. A mathematician whose theories did much to advance research into analysis, algebraic geometry, and mechanics, he made his most important contributions in the field of analysis and analytic geometry. He used methods of successive approximation to show the existence of solutions of ordinary differential equations. Picard also applied analysis to the study of elasticity, heat, and electricity. He and Henri Poincaré have been described as the most distinguished French mathematicians in their time.
Indeed, Picard was elected the fifteenth member to occupy seat 1 of the Académie française in 1924.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”*…
Imaginary numbers were long dismissed as mathematical “bookkeeping.” But now, as Karmela Padavic-Callaghan explains, physicists are proving that they describe the hidden shape of nature…
Many science students may imagine a ball rolling down a hill or a car skidding because of friction as prototypical examples of the systems physicists care about. But much of modern physics consists of searching for objects and phenomena that are virtually invisible: the tiny electrons of quantum physics and the particles hidden within strange metals of materials science along with their highly energetic counterparts that only exist briefly within giant particle colliders.
In their quest to grasp these hidden building blocks of reality scientists have looked to mathematical theories and formalism. Ideally, an unexpected experimental observation leads a physicist to a new mathematical theory, and then mathematical work on said theory leads them to new experiments and new observations. Some part of this process inevitably happens in the physicist’s mind, where symbols and numbers help make invisible theoretical ideas visible in the tangible, measurable physical world.
Sometimes, however, as in the case of imaginary numbers – that is, numbers with negative square values – mathematics manages to stay ahead of experiments for a long time. Though imaginary numbers have been integral to quantum theory since its very beginnings in the 1920s, scientists have only recently been able to find their physical signatures in experiments and empirically prove their necessity…
Learn more at “Imaginary numbers are real,” from @Ironmely in @aeonmag.
* The Red Queen, in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass
###
As we get real, we might spare a thought for two great mathematicians…
Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann died on this date in 1866. A mathematician who made contributions to analysis, number theory, and differential geometry, he is remembered (among other things) for his 1859 paper on the prime-counting function, containing the original statement of the Riemann hypothesis, regarded as one of the most influential papers in analytic number theory.
Andrey (Andrei) Andreyevich Markov died on this date in 1922. A Russian mathematician, he helped to develop the theory of stochastic processes, especially those now called Markov chains: sequences of random variables in which the future variable is determined by the present variable but is independent of the way in which the present state arose from its predecessors. (For example, the probability of winning at the game of Monopoly can be determined using Markov chains.) His work on the study of the probability of mutually-dependent events has been developed and widely applied to the biological, physical, and social sciences, and is widely used in Monte Carlo simulations and Bayesian analyses.
You must be logged in to post a comment.