Posts Tagged ‘Riemann’
“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
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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.

“I may be going nowhere, but what a ride”*…
Nine salvaged bikes were reassembled into a carousel formation. The bike is modular and can be dismantled, transported and reassembled. It is normally left in public places where it can attract a variety of riders and spectators.
From artist Robert Wechsler, the Circular Bike.
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As we return to where we started, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Stephen Smale; he was born on this date in 1930. A winner of both the Fields Medal and the Wolf Prize, the highest honors in mathematics, he first gained recognition with a proof of the Poincaré conjecture for all dimensions greater than or equal to 5, published in 1961. He then moved to dynamic systems, developing an understanding of strange attractors which lead to chaos, and contributing to mathematical economics. His most recent work is in theoretical computer science.
In 1998, in the spirit of Hilbert’s famous list of problems produced in 1900, he created a list of 18 unanswered challenges– known as Smale’s problems– to be solved in the 21st century. (In fact, Smale’s list contains some of the original Hilbert problems, including the Riemann hypothesis and the second half of Hilbert’s sixteenth problem, both of which are still unsolved.)
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