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 the word algebra is derived from an Arabic term for the surgical treatment of bonesetting?
- ... 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 museum director Alena Aladava rebuilt the Belarusian national art collection in the aftermath of the Second World War?
- ... that the number of cannonballs in a square pyramid with cannonballs along each edge is ?
- ... that two members of the French parliament were killed when a delayed-action German bomb exploded in the town hall at Bapaume on 25 March 1917?
- ... that circle packings in the form of a Doyle spiral were used to model plant growth long before their mathematical investigation by Doyle?
- ... that mathematician Mathias Metternich was one of the founders of the Jacobin club of the Republic of Mainz?
- ... that after Archimedes first defined convex curves, mathematicians lost interest in their analysis until the 19th century, more than two millennia later?
More did you know –
- ...that the identity elements for arithmetic operations make use of the only two whole numbers that are neither composites nor prime numbers, 0 and 1?
- ...that as of April 2010 only 35 even numbers have been found that are not the sum of two primes which are each in a Twin Primes pair? ref
- ...the Piphilology record (memorizing digits of Pi) is 70000 as of Mar 2015?
- ...that people are significantly slower to identify the parity of zero than other whole numbers, regardless of age, language spoken, or whether the symbol or word for zero is used?
- ...that Auction theory was successfully used in 1994 to sell FCC airwave spectrum, in a financial application of game theory?
- ...properties of Pascal's triangle have application in many fields of mathematics including combinatorics, algebra, calculus and geometry?
- ...work in artificial intelligence makes use of swarm intelligence, which has foundations in the behavioral examples found in nature of ants, birds, bees, and fish among others?
Selected article –
The region between two loxodromes on a geometric sphere. Image credit: Karthik Narayanaswami |
The Riemann sphere is a way of extending the plane of complex numbers with one additional point at infinity, in a way that makes expressions such as
well-behaved and useful, at least in certain contexts. It is named after 19th century mathematician Bernhard Riemann. It is also called the complex projective line, denoted CP1.
On a purely algebraic level, the complex numbers with an extra infinity element constitute a number system known as the extended complex numbers. Arithmetic with infinity does not obey all of the usual rules of algebra, and so the extended complex numbers do not form a field. However, the Riemann sphere is geometrically and analytically well-behaved, even near infinity; it is a one-dimensional complex manifold, also called a Riemann surface.
In complex analysis, the Riemann sphere facilitates an elegant theory of meromorphic functions. The Riemann sphere is ubiquitous in projective geometry and algebraic geometry as a fundamental example of a complex manifold, projective space, and algebraic variety. It also finds utility in other disciplines that depend on analysis and geometry, such as quantum mechanics and other branches of physics. (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