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...)
Featured articles –
Selected image –
Good articles –
Did you know (auto-generated) –
- ... that according to one critic, the math rock album Cryptooology by Yowie "sounds like an explosion in a Slinky factory"?
- ... that Latvian-Soviet artist Karlis Johansons exhibited a skeletal tensegrity form of the Schönhardt polyhedron seven years before Erich Schönhardt's 1928 paper on its mathematics?
- ... that despite published scholarship to the contrary, Andrew Planta neither received a doctorate nor taught mathematics at Erlangen?
- ... that subgroup distortion theory, introduced by Misha Gromov in 1993, can help encode text?
- ... that despite a mathematical model deeming the ice cream bar flavour Goody Goody Gum Drops impossible, it was still created?
- ... that mathematician Mathias Metternich was one of the founders of the Jacobin club of the Republic of Mainz?
- ... that the mathematical infinity symbol ∞ may be derived from the Roman numerals for 1000 or for 100 million?
- ... that museum director Alena Aladava rebuilt the Belarusian national art collection in the aftermath of the Second World War?
More did you know –
- … that every positive integer can be written as the sum of three palindromic numbers in every number system with base 5 or greater?
- … that the best known lower bound for the length of the smallest superpermutation was first posted anonymously to the internet imageboard 4chan?
- ...that the mathematician Grigori Perelman was offered a Fields Medal in 2006, in part for his proof of the Poincaré conjecture, which he declined?
- ...that a regular heptagon is the regular polygon with the fewest sides which is not constructible with a compass and straightedge?
- ...that the regular trigonometric functions and the hyperbolic trigonometric functions can be related without using complex numbers through the Gudermannian function?
- ...that the Catalan numbers solve a number of problems in combinatorics such as the number of ways to completely parenthesize an algebraic expression with n+1 factors?
- ...that a ball can be cut up and reassembled into two balls, each the same size as the original (Banach-Tarski paradox)?
Selected article –
The second Borel-Cantelli lemma implies that a chimpanzee like this one typing at random will almost surely produce the complete works of Shakespeare, given enough time. Image credit: User:Chris 73 |
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type or create a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. Note that "almost surely" in this context is a mathematical term with a specific meaning, and that the "monkey" is not an actual monkey; rather, it is a vivid metaphor for an abstract device that produces an unending, random sequence of letters.
The theorem graphically illustrates the perils of reasoning about infinity by imagining a vast but finite number. If every atom in the visible universe were a monkey producing a billion keystrokes a second from the Big Bang until today, it is still very unlikely that any monkey would get as far as "slings and arrows" in Hamlets most famous soliloquy. The infinite monkey theorem is straightforward to prove, even without appealing to more advanced results. ('Full article...)
View all selected articles |
Subcategories
Algebra | Arithmetic | Analysis | Complex analysis | Applied mathematics | Calculus | Category theory | Chaos theory | Combinatorics | Dynamical systems | Fractals | Game theory | Geometry | Algebraic geometry | Graph theory | Group theory | Linear algebra | Mathematical logic | Model theory | Multi-dimensional geometry | Number theory | Numerical analysis | Optimization | Order theory | Probability and statistics | Set theory | Statistics | Topology | Algebraic topology | Trigonometry | Linear programming
Mathematics | History of mathematics | Mathematicians | Awards | Education | Literature | Notation | Organizations | Theorems | Proofs | Unsolved problems
Topics in mathematics
General | Foundations | Number theory | Discrete mathematics |
---|---|---|---|
| |||
Algebra | Analysis | Geometry and topology | Applied mathematics |
Index of mathematics articles
ARTICLE INDEX: | |
MATHEMATICIANS: |
Related portals
WikiProjects
The Mathematics WikiProject is the center for mathematics-related editing on Wikipedia. Join the discussion on the project's talk page.
Project pages Essays Subprojects Related projects
|
Things you can do
|
In other Wikimedia projects
The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:
-
Commons
Free media repository -
Wikibooks
Free textbooks and manuals -
Wikidata
Free knowledge base -
Wikinews
Free-content news -
Wikiquote
Collection of quotations -
Wikisource
Free-content library -
Wikiversity
Free learning tools -
Wiktionary
Dictionary and thesaurus