Schlagwort: Mathematik

Life after Bach and Bourbaki.

I like living in this time. Having missed many good musicians is compensated by logic and math being in a both stable and interesting shape.

What academia should always be and feel like.

And now I have learnt it. I understand orbifolds and the group theory necessary to prove Conway's theorem. I have proved the theorem myself, and the corollary that there are only seventeen periodic tessellations of the plane. I still like the subject a lot and I am happy to have written my bachelor thesis about it.

Emma Brakkee: Conway’s Theorem (Bachelor Thesis)

Equilibrium Pages.

Good and new ideas should always fit on two one page.

Musical Doughnut.

The topology of the syntonic temperament's tonnetz is generally cylindrical. Any syntonic "equal" tuning (i.e., a tempered width of the perfect fifth which divides the octave into a number of equally-wide intervals) snaps this cylinder into a torus(the shape of a ring doughnut, a hula hoop or an inflated tire), showing that it has a topology equivalent to S1×S1.

Wikipedia: Tonnetz

42.

For example the field of real numbers forms a structure R whose elements are the real numbers, with signature consisting of the individual constant 0 to name the number zero, a 1-ary function symbol - for minus, and two 2-ary function symbols + and . for plus and times. At first sight we can't add a symbol to express 1/x, since all the named functions have to be defined on the whole domain of the structure, and there is no such real number as 1/0. But on second thoughts this is not a serious problem; any competent mathematician puts the condition ‘x is not zero’ before dividing by x, and so it never matters what the value of 1/0 is, and we can harmlessly take it to be 42. But most model theorists are uncomfortable with any kind of division by zero, so they stick with plus, times and minus.

Hodges, Wilfrid, "First-order Model Theory", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition)