Words About A Wordless Induction Proof

This pair of tweets came across my feed. And who doesn’t like a good visual proof of a mathematical fact? I hope you enjoy.

So here’s the proposition.

This is the sort of identity we normally try proving by induction. Induction is a great scheme for proving identities like this. It works by finding some index on the formula. Then show that if the formula is true for one value of the index, then it’s true for the next-higher value of the index. Finally, find some value of the index for which it’s easy to check that the formula’s true. And that proves it’s true for all the values of that index above that base.

In this case the index is ‘n’. It’s really easy to prove the base case, since 13 is equal to 12 what with ‘1’ being the number everybody likes to raise to powers. Going from proving that if it’s true in one case — $1^3 + 2^3 + 3^3 + \cdots + n^3$ — then it’s true for the next — $1^3 + 2^3 + 3^3 + \cdots + n^3 + (n + 1)^3$ — is work. But you can get it done.

And then there’s this, done visually:

It took me a bit to read fully until I was confident in what it was showing. But it is all there.

As often happens with these wordless proofs you can ask whether it is properly speaking a proof. A proof is an argument and to be complete it has to contain every step needed to deduce the conclusion from the premises, following one of the rules of inference each step. Thing is basically no proof is complete that way, because it takes forever. We elide stuff that seems obvious, confident that if we had to we could fill in the intermediate steps. A wordless proof like trusts that if we try to describe what is in the picture then we are constructing the argument.

That’s surely enough of my words.

The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z Roundup

As is my tradition for the end of these roundups (see Summer 2015 and then Leap Day 2016) I want to just put up a page listing the whole set of articles. It’s a chance for people who missed a piece to easily see what they missed. And it lets me recover that little bit extra from the experience. Run over the past two months were:

The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Xi Function

I have today another request from gaurish, who’s also been good enough to give me requests for ‘Y’ and ‘Z’. I apologize for coming to this a day late. But it was Christmas and many things demanded my attention.

Xi Function.

We start with complex-valued numbers. People discovered them because they were useful tools to solve polynomials. They turned out to be more than useful fictions, if numbers are anything more than useful fictions. We can add and subtract them easily. Multiply and divide them less easily. We can even raise them to powers, or raise numbers to them.

If you become a mathematics major then somewhere in Intro to Complex Analysis you’re introduced to an exotic, infinitely large sum. It’s spoken of reverently as the Riemann Zeta Function, and it connects to something named the Riemann Hypothesis. Then you remember that you’ve heard of this, because if you’re willing to become a mathematics major you’ve read mathematics popularizations. And you know the Riemann Hypothesis is an unsolved problem. It proposes something that might be true or might be false. Either way has astounding implications for the way numbers fit together.

Riemann here is Bernard Riemann, who’s turned up often in these A To Z sequences. We saw him in spheres and in sums, leading to integrals. We’ll see him again. Riemann just covered so much of 19th century mathematics; we can’t talk about calculus without him. Zeta, Xi, and later on, Gamma are the famous Greek letters. Mathematicians fall back on them because the Roman alphabet just hasn’t got enough letters for our needs. I’m writing them out as English words instead because if you aren’t familiar with them they look like an indistinct set of squiggles. Even if you are familiar, sometimes. I got confused in researching this some because I did slip between a lowercase-xi and a lowercase-zeta in my mind. All I can plead is it’s been a hard week.

Riemann’s Zeta function is famous. It’s easy to approach. You can write it as a sum. An infinite sum, but still, those are easy to understand. Pick a complex-valued number. I’ll call it ‘s’ because that’s the standard. Next take each of the counting numbers: 1, 2, 3, and so on. Raise each of them to the power ‘s’. And take the reciprocal, one divided by those numbers. Add all that together. You’ll get something. Might be real. Might be complex-valued. Might be zero. We know many values of ‘s’ what would give us a zero. The Riemann Hypothesis is about characterizing all the possible values of ‘s’ that give us a zero. We know some of them, so boring we call them trivial: -2, -4, -6, -8, and so on. (This looks crazy. There’s another way of writing the Riemann Zeta function which makes it obvious instead.) The Riemann Hypothesis is about whether all the proper, that is, non-boring values of ‘s’ that give us a zero are 1/2 plus some imaginary number.

It’s a rare thing mathematicians have only one way of writing. If something’s been known and studied for a long time there are usually variations. We find different ways to write the problem. Or we find different problems which, if solved, would solve the original problem. The Riemann Xi function is an example of this.

I’m going to spare you the formula for it. That’s in self-defense. I haven’t found an expression of the Xi function that isn’t a mess. The normal ways to write it themselves call on the Zeta function, as well as the Gamma function. The Gamma function looks like factorials, for the counting numbers. It does its own thing for other complex-valued numbers.

That said, I’m not sure what the advantages are in looking at the Xi function. The one that people talk about is its symmetry. Its value at a particular complex-valued number ‘s’ is the same as its value at the number ‘1 – s’. This may not seem like much. But it gives us this way of rewriting the Riemann Hypothesis. Imagine all the complex-valued numbers with the same imaginary part. That is, all the numbers that we could write as, say, ‘x + 4i’, where ‘x’ is some real number. If the size of the value of Xi, evaluated at ‘x + 4i’, always increases as ‘x’ starts out equal to 1/2 and increases, then the Riemann hypothesis is true. (This has to be true not just for ‘x + 4i’, but for all possible imaginary numbers. So, ‘x + 5i’, and ‘x + 6i’, and even ‘x + 4.1 i’ and so on. But it’s easier to start with a single example.)

Or another way to write it. Suppose the size of the value of Xi, evaluated at ‘x + 4i’ (or whatever), always gets smaller as ‘x’ starts out at a negative infinitely large number and keeps increasing all the way to 1/2. If that’s true, and true for every imaginary number, including ‘x – i’, then the Riemann hypothesis is true.

And it turns out if the Riemann hypothesis is true we can prove the two cases above. We’d write the theorem about this in our papers with the start ‘The Following Are Equivalent’. In our notes we’d write ‘TFAE’, which is just as good. Then we’d take which ever of them seemed easiest to prove and find out it isn’t that easy after all. But if we do get through we declare ourselves fortunate, sit back feeling triumphant, and consider going out somewhere to celebrate. But we haven’t got any of these alternatives solved yet. None of the equivalent ways to write it has helped so far.

We know some some things. For example, we know there are infinitely many roots for the Xi function with a real part that’s 1/2. This is what we’d need for the Riemann hypothesis to be true. But we don’t know that all of them are.

The Xi function isn’t entirely about what it can tell us for the Zeta function. The Xi function has its own exotic and wonderful properties. In a 2009 paper on arxiv.org, for example, Drs Yang-Hui He, Vishnu Jejjala, and Djordje Minic describe how if the zeroes of the Xi function are all exactly where we expect them to be then we learn something about a particular kind of string theory. I admit not knowing just what to say about a genus-one free energy of the topological string past what I have read in this paper. In another paper they write of how the zeroes of the Xi function correspond to the description of the behavior for a quantum-mechanical operator that I just can’t find a way to describe clearly in under three thousand words.

But mathematicians often speak of the strangeness that mathematical constructs can match reality so well. And here is surely a powerful one. We learned of the Riemann Hypothesis originally by studying how many prime numbers there are compared to the counting numbers. If it’s true, then the physics of the universe may be set up one particular way. Is that not astounding?

• gaurish 5:34 am on Wednesday, 28 December, 2016 Permalink | Reply

Yes it’s astounding. You have a very nice talent of talking about mathematical quantities without showing formulas :)

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• Joseph Nebus 5:15 am on Thursday, 5 January, 2017 Permalink | Reply

You’re most kind, thank you. I’ve probably gone overboard in avoiding formulas lately though.

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The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Weierstrass Function

I’ve teased this one before.

Weierstrass Function.

So you know how the Earth is a sphere, but from our normal vantage point right up close to its surface it looks flat? That happens with functions too. Here I mean the normal kinds of functions we deal with, ones with domains that are the real numbers or a Euclidean space. And ranges that are real numbers. The functions you can draw on a sheet of paper with some wiggly bits. Let the function wiggle as much as you want. Pick a part of it and zoom in close. That zoomed-in part will look straight. If it doesn’t look straight, zoom in closer.

We rely on this. Functions that are straight, or at least straight enough, are easy to work with. We can do calculus on them. We can do analysis on them. Functions with plots that look like straight lines are easy to work with. Often the best approach to working with the function you’re interested in is to approximate it with an easy-to-work-with function. I bet it’ll be a polynomial. That serves us well. Polynomials are these continuous functions. They’re differentiable. They’re smooth.

That thing about the Earth looking flat, though? That’s a lie. I’ve never been to any of the really great cuts in the Earth’s surface, but I have been to some decent gorges. I went to grad school in the Hudson River Valley. I’ve driven I-80 over Pennsylvania’s scariest bridges. There’s points where the surface of the Earth just drops a great distance between your one footstep and your last.

Functions do that too. We can have points where a function isn’t differentiable, where it’s impossible to define the direction it’s headed. We can have points where a function isn’t continuous, where it jumps from one region of values to another region. Everyone knows this. We can’t dismiss those as abberations not worthy of the name “function”; too many of them are too useful. Typically we handle this by admitting there’s points that aren’t continuous and we chop the function up. We make it into a couple of functions, each stretching from discontinuity to discontinuity. Between them we have continuous region and we can go about our business as before.

Then came the 19th century when things got crazy. This particular craziness we credit to Karl Weierstrass. Weierstrass’s name is all over 19th century analysis. He had that talent for probing the limits of our intuition about basic mathematical ideas. We have a calculus that is logically rigorous because he found great counterexamples to what we had assumed without proving.

The Weierstrass function challenges this idea that any function is going to eventually level out. Or that we can even smooth a function out into basically straight, predictable chunks in-between sudden changes of direction. The function is continuous everywhere; you can draw it perfectly without lifting your pen from paper. But it always looks like a zig-zag pattern, jumping around like it was always randomly deciding whether to go up or down next. Zoom in on any patch and it still jumps around, zig-zagging up and down. There’s never an interval where it’s always moving up, or always moving down, or even just staying constant.

Despite being continuous it’s not differentiable. I’ve described that casually as it being impossible to predict where the function is going. That’s an abuse of words, yes. The function is defined. Its value at a point isn’t any more random than the value of “x2” is for any particular x. The unpredictability I’m talking about here is a side effect of ignorance. Imagine I showed you a plot of “x2” with a part of it concealed and asked you to fill in the gap. You’d probably do pretty well estimating it. The Weierstrass function, though? No; your guess would be lousy. My guess would be lousy too.

That’s a weird thing to have happen. A century and a half later it’s still weird. It gets weirder. The Weierstrass function isn’t differentiable generally. But there are exceptions. There are little dots of differentiability, where the rate at which the function changes is known. Not intervals, though. Single points. This is crazy. Derivatives are about how a function changes. We work out what they should even mean by thinking of a function’s value on strips of the domain. Those strips are small, but they’re still, you know, strips. But on almost all of that strip the derivative isn’t defined. It’s only at isolated points, a set with measure zero, that this derivative even exists. It evokes the medieval Mysteries, of how we are supposed to try, even though we know we shall fail, to understand how God can have contradictory properties.

It’s not quite that Mysterious here. Properties like this challenge our intuition, if we’ve gotten any. Once we’ve laid out good definitions for ideas like “derivative” and “continuous” and “limit” and “function” we can work out whether results like this make sense. And they — well, they follow. We can avoid weird conclusions like this, but at the cost of messing up our definitions for what a “function” and other things are. Making those useless. For the mathematical world to make sense, we have to change our idea of what quite makes sense.

That’s all right. When we look close we realize the Earth around us is never flat. Even reasonably flat areas have slight rises and falls. The ends of properties are marked with curbs or ditches, and bordered by streets that rise to a center. Look closely even at the dirt and we notice that as level as it gets there are still rocks and scratches in the ground, clumps of dirt an infinitesimal bit higher here and lower there. The flatness of the Earth around us is a useful tool, but we miss a lot by pretending it’s everything. The Weierstrass function is one of the ways a student mathematician learns that while smooth, predictable functions are essential, there is much more out there.

The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Smooth

Mathematicians affect a pose of objectivity. We justify this by working on things whose truth we can know, and which must be true whenever we accept certain rules of deduction and certain definitions and axioms. This seems fair. But we choose to pay attention to things that interest us for particular reasons. We study things we like. My A To Z glossary term for today is about one of those things we like.

Smooth.

Functions. Not everything mathematicians do is functions. But functions turn up a lot. We need to set some rules. “A function” is so generic a thing we can’t handle it much. Narrow it down. Pick functions with domains that are numbers. Range too. By numbers I mean real numbers, maybe complex numbers. That gives us something.

There’s functions that are hard to work with. This is almost all of them, so we don’t touch them unless we absolutely must. But they’re functions that aren’t continuous. That means what you imagine. The value of the function at some point is wholly unrelated to its value at some nearby point. It’s hard to work with anything that’s unpredictable like that. Functions as well as people.

We like functions that are continuous. They’re predictable. We can make approximations. We can estimate the function’s value at some point using its value at some more convenient point. It’s easy to see why that’s useful for numerical mathematics, for calculations to approximate stuff. The dazzling thing is it’s useful analytically. We step into the Platonic-ideal world of pure mathematics. We have tools that let us work as if we had infinitely many digits of precision, for infinitely many numbers at once. And yet we use estimates and approximations and errors. We use them in ways to give us perfect knowledge; we get there by estimates.

Continuous functions are nice. Well, they’re nicer to us than functions that aren’t continuous. But there are even nicer functions. Functions nicer to us. A continuous function, for example, can have corners; it can change direction suddenly and without warning. A differentiable function is more predictable. It can’t have corners like that. Knowing the function well at one point gives us more information about what it’s like nearby.

The derivative of a function doesn’t have to be continuous. Grumble. It’s nice when it is, though. It makes the function easier to work with. It’s really nice for us when the derivative itself has a derivative. Nothing guarantees that the derivative of a derivative is continuous. But maybe it is. Maybe the derivative of the derivative has a derivative. That’s a function we can do a lot with.

A function is “smooth” if it has as many derivatives as we need for whatever it is we’re doing. And if those derivatives are continuous. If this seems loose that’s because it is. A proof for whatever we’re interested in might need only the original function and its first derivative. It might need the original function and its first, second, third, and fourth derivatives. It might need hundreds of derivatives. If we look through the details of the proof we might find exactly how many derivatives we need and how many of them need to be continuous. But that’s tedious. We save ourselves considerable time by saying the function is “smooth”, as in, “smooth enough for what we need”.

If we do want to specify how many continuous derivatives a function has we call it a “Ck function”. The C here means continuous. The ‘k’ means there are the number ‘k’ continuous derivatives of it. This is completely different from a “Ck function”, which would be one that’s a k-dimensional vector. Whether the “C” is boldface or not is important. A function might have infinitely many continuous derivatives. That we call a “C function”. That’s got wonderful properties, especially if the domain and range are complex-valued numbers. We couldn’t do Complex Analysis without it. Complex Analysis is the course students take after wondering how they’ll ever survive Real Analysis. It’s much easier than Real Analysis. Mathematics can be strange.

The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Kernel

I told you that Image thing would reappear. Meanwhile I learned something about myself in writing this.

Kernel.

I want to talk about functions again. I’ve been keeping like a proper mathematician to a nice general idea of what a function is. The sort where a function’s this rule matching stuff in a set called the domain with stuff in a set called the range. And I’ve tried not to commit myself to saying anything about what that domain and range are. They could be numbers. They could be other functions. They could be the set of DVDs you own but haven’t watched in more than two years. They could be collections socks. Haven’t said.

But we know what functions anyone cares about. They’re stuff that have domains and ranges that are numbers. Preferably real numbers. Complex-valued numbers if we must. If we look at more exotic sets they’re ones that stick close to being numbers: vectors made up of an ordered set of numbers. Matrices of numbers. Functions that are themselves about numbers. Maybe we’ll get to something exotic like a rotation, but then what is a rotation but spinning something a certain number of degrees? There are a bunch of unavoidably common domains and ranges.

Fine, then. I’ll stick to functions with ranges that look enough like regular old numbers. By “enough” I mean they have a zero. That is, something that works like zero does. You know, add it to something else and that something else isn’t changed. That’s all I need.

A natural thing to wonder about a function — hold on. “Natural” is the wrong word. Something we learn to wonder about in functions, in pre-algebra class where they’re all polynomials, is where the zeroes are. They’re generally not at zero. Why would we say “zeroes” to mean “zero”? That could let non-mathematicians think they knew what we were on about. By the “zeroes” we mean the things in the domain that get matched to the zero in the range. It might be zero; no reason it couldn’t, until we know what the function’s rule is. Just we can’t count on that.

A polynomial we know has … well, it might have zero zeroes. Might have no zeroes. It might have one, or two, or so on. If it’s an n-th degree polynomial it can have up to n zeroes. And if it’s not a polynomial? Well, then it could have any conceivable number of zeroes and nobody is going to give you a nice little formula to say where they all are. It’s not that we’re being mean. It’s just that there isn’t a nice little formula that works for all possibilities. There aren’t even nice little formulas that work for all polynomials. You have to find zeroes by thinking about the problem. Sorry.

But! Suppose you have a collection of all the zeroes for your function. That’s all the points in the domain that match with zero in the range. Then we have a new name for the thing you have. And that’s the kernel of your function. It’s the biggest subset in the domain with an image that’s just the zero in the range.

So we have a name for the zeroes that isn’t just “the zeroes”. What does this get us?

If we don’t know anything about the kind of function we have, not much. If the function belongs to some common kinds of functions, though, it tells us stuff.

For example. Suppose the function has domain and range that are vectors. And that the function is linear, which is to say, easy to deal with. Let me call the function ‘f’. And let me pick out two things in the domain. I’ll call them ‘x’ and ‘y’ because I’m writing this after Thanksgiving dinner and can’t work up a cleverer name for anything. If f is linear then f(x + y) is the same thing as f(x) + f(y). And now something magic happens. If x and y are both in the kernel, then x + y has to be in the kernel too. Think about it. Meanwhile, if x is in the kernel but y isn’t, then f(x + y) is f(y). Again think about it.

What we can see is that the domain fractures into two directions. One of them, the direction of the kernel, is invisible to the function. You can move however much you like in that direction and f can’t see it. The other direction, perpendicular (“orthogonal”, we say in the trade) to the kernel, is visible. Everything that might change changes in that direction.

This idea threads through vector spaces, and we study a lot of things that turn out to look like vector spaces. It keeps surprising us by letting us solve problems, or find the best-possible approximate solutions. This kernel gives us room to match some fiddly conditions without breaking the real solution. The size of the null space alone can tell us whether some problems are solvable, or whether they’ll have infinitely large sets of solutions.

In this vector-space construct the kernel often takes on another name, the “null space”. This means the same thing. But it reminds us that superhero comics writers miss out on many excellent pieces of terminology by not taking advanced courses in mathematics.

Kernels also appear in group theory, whenever we get into rings. We’re always working with rings. They’re nearly as unavoidable as vector spaces.

You know how you can divide the whole numbers into odd and even? And you can do some neat tricks with that for some problems? You can do that with every ring, using the kernel as a dividing point. This gives us information about how the ring is shaped, and what other structures might look like the ring. This often lets us turn proofs that might be hard into a collection of proofs on individual cases that are, at least, doable. Tricks about odd and even numbers become, in trained hands, subtle proofs of surprising results.

We see vector spaces and rings all over the place in mathematics. Some of that’s selection bias. Vector spaces capture a lot of what’s important about geometry. Rings capture a lot of what’s important about arithmetic. We have understandings of geometry and arithmetic that transcend even our species. Raccoons understand space. Crows understand number. When we look to do mathematics we look for patterns we understand, and these are major patterns we understand. And there are kernels that matter to each of them.

Some mathematical ideas inspire metaphors to me. Kernels are one. Kernels feel to me like the process of holding a polarized lens up to a crystal. This lets one see how the crystal is put together. I realize writing this down that my metaphor is unclear: is the kernel the lens or the structure seen in the crystal? I suppose the function has to be the lens, with the kernel the crystallization planes made clear under it. It’s curious I had enjoyed this feeling about kernels and functions for so long without making it precise. Feelings about mathematical structures can be like that.

• Barb Knowles 8:42 pm on Friday, 25 November, 2016 Permalink | Reply

Don’t be mad if I tell you I’ve never had a feeling about a mathematical structure, lol. But it is immensely satisfying to solve an equation. I’m not a math person. As an English as a New Language teacher, I have to help kids with algebra at times. I usually break out in a sweat and am ecstatic when I can actually help them.

Liked by 1 person

• Joseph Nebus 11:24 pm on Friday, 25 November, 2016 Permalink | Reply

I couldn’t be mad about that! I don’t have feeling like that about most mathematical constructs myself. There’s just a few that stand out for one reason or another.

I am intrigued by the ways teaching differs for different subjects. How other people teach mathematics (or physics) interests me too, but I’ve noticed some strong cultural similarities across different departments and fields. Other subjects have a greater novelty value for me.

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• Barb Knowles 11:42 pm on Friday, 25 November, 2016 Permalink | Reply

My advisor in college (Romance Language manor) told me that I should do well in math because it is a language, formulas are like grammar and there is a lot of memorization. Not being someone with math skills, I replied ummmm. I don’t think she was impressed, lol.

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• Joseph Nebus 9:22 pm on Wednesday, 30 November, 2016 Permalink | Reply

I’m not sure that I could go along with the idea of mathematics as a language. But there is something that seems like a grammar to formulas. That is, there are formulas that just look right or look wrong, even before exploring their content. Sometimes a formula just looks … ungrammatical. Sometimes that impression is wrong. But there is something that stands out.

As for mathematics skills, well, I think people usually have more skill than they realize. There’s a lot of mathematics out there, much of it not related to calculations, and it’d be amazing if none of it intrigued you or came easily.

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The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z: The Fredholm Alternative

Some things are created with magnificent names. My essay today is about one of them. It’s one of my favorite terms and I get a strange little delight whenever it needs to be mentioned in a proof. It’s also the title I shall use for my 1970s Paranoid-Conspiracy Thriller.

The Fredholm Alternative.

So the Fredholm Alternative is about whether this supercomputer with the ability to monitor every commercial transaction in the country falls into the hands of the Parallax Corporation or whether — ahm. Sorry. Wrong one. OK.

The Fredholm Alternative comes from the world of functional analysis. In functional analysis we study sets of functions with tools from elsewhere in mathematics. Some you’d be surprised aren’t already in there. There’s adding functions together, multiplying them, the stuff of arithmetic. Some might be a bit surprising, like the stuff we draw from linear algebra. That’s ideas like functions having length, or being at angles to each other. Or that length and those angles changing when we take a function of those functions. This may sound baffling. But a mathematics student who’s got into functional analysis usually has a happy surprise waiting. She discovers the subject is easy. At least, it relies on a lot of stuff she’s learned already, applied to stuff that’s less difficult to work with than, like, numbers.

(This may be a personal bias. I found functional analysis a thoroughgoing delight, even though I didn’t specialize in it. But I got the impression from other grad students that functional analysis was well-liked. Maybe we just got the right instructor for it.)

I’ve mentioned in passing “operators”. These are functions that have a domain that’s a set of functions and a range that’s another set of functions. Suppose you come up to me with some function, let’s say $f(x) = x^2$. I give you back some other function — say, $F(x) = \frac{1}{3}x^3 - 4$. Then I’m acting as an operator.

Why should I do such a thing? Many operators correspond to doing interesting stuff. Taking derivatives of functions, for example. Or undoing the work of taking a derivative. Describing how changing a condition changes what sorts of outcomes a process has. We do a lot of stuff with these. Trust me.

Let me use the name T’ for some operator. I’m not going to say anything about what it does. The letter’s arbitrary. We like to use capital letters for operators because it makes the operators look extra important. And we don’t want to use O’ because that just looks like zero and we don’t need that confusion.

Anyway. We need two functions. One of them will be called ‘f’ because we always call functions ‘f’. The other we’ll call ‘v’. In setting up the Fredholm Alternative we have this important thing: we know what ‘f’ is. We don’t know what ‘v’ is. We’re finding out something about what ‘v’ might be. The operator doing whatever it does to a function we write down as if it were multiplication, that is, like ‘Tv’. We get this notation from linear algebra. There we multiple matrices by vectors. Matrix-times-vector multiplication works like operator-on-a-function stuff. So much so that if we didn’t use the same notation young mathematics grad students would rise in rebellion. “This is absurd,” they would say, in unison. “The connotations of these processes are too alike not to use the same notation!” And the department chair would admit they have a point. So we write ‘Tv’.

If you skipped out on mathematics after high school you might guess we’d write ‘T(v)’ and that would make sense too. And, actually, we do sometimes. But by the time we’re doing a lot of functional analysis we don’t need the parentheses so much. They don’t clarify anything we’re confused about, and they require all the work of parenthesis-making. But I do see it sometimes, mostly in older books. This makes me think mathematicians started out with ‘T(v)’ and then wrote less as people got used to what they were doing.

I admit we might not literally know what ‘f’ is. I mean we know what ‘f’ is in the same way that, for a quadratic equation, “ax2 + bx + c = 0”, we “know” what ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’ are. Similarly we don’t know what ‘v’ is in the same way we don’t know what ‘x’ there is. The Fredholm Alternative tells us exactly one of these two things has to be true:

For operators that meet some requirements I don’t feel like getting into, either:

1. There’s one and only one ‘v’ which makes the equation $Tv = f$ true.
2. Or else $Tv = 0$ for some ‘v’ that isn’t just zero everywhere.

That is, either there’s exactly one solution, or else there’s no solving this particular equation. We can rule out there being two solutions (the way quadratic equations often have), or ten solutions (the way some annoying problems will), or infinitely many solutions (oh, it happens).

It turns up often in boundary value problems. Often before we try solving one we spend some time working out whether there is a solution. You can imagine why it’s worth spending a little time working that out before committing to a big equation-solving project. But it comes up elsewhere. Very often we have problems that, at their core, are “does this operator match anything at all in the domain to a particular function in the range?” When we try to answer we stumble across Fredholm’s Alternative over and over.

Fredholm here was Ivar Fredholm, a Swedish mathematician of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He worked for Uppsala University, and for the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, and as an actuary for the Skandia insurance company. Wikipedia tells me that his mathematical work was used to calculate buyback prices. I have no idea how.

Reading the Comics, October 1, 2016: Jumble Is Back Edition

Comic Strip Master Command sent another normal-style week for mathematics references. There’s not much that lets me get really chatty or gossippy about mathematics lore. That’s all right. The important thing is: we’ve got Jumble back.

Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 25th features a bit of parental nonsense-telling. The rather annoying noise inside a car’s cabin when there’s one window open is the sort of thing fluid mechanics ought to be able to study. I see references claiming this noise to be a Helmholz Resonance. This is a kind of oscillation in the air that comes from wind blowing across the lone hole in a solid object. Wikipedia says it’s even the same phenomenon producing an ocean-roar in a seashell held up to the ear. It’s named for Hermann von Helmholtz, who described it while studying sound and vortices. Helmholz is also renowned for making a clear statement of the conservation of energy — an idea many were working towards, mind — and in thermodynamics and electromagnetism and for that matter how the eye works. Also how fast nerves transmit signals. All that said, I’m not sure that all the unpleasant sound heard and pressure felt from a single opened car window is Helmholz Resonance. Real stuff is complicated and the full story is always more complicated than that. I wouldn’t go farther than saying that Helmholz Resonance is one thing to look at.

Michael Cavna’s Warped for the 25th uses two mathematics-cliché equations as “amazingly successful formulas”. One can quibble with whether Einstein should be counted under mathematics. Pythagoras, at least for the famous theorem named for him, nobody would argue. John Grisham, I don’t know, the joke seems dated to me but we are talking about the comics.

Tony Carrillos’ F Minus for the 28th uses arithmetic as as something no reasonable person can claim is incorrect. I haven’t read the comments, but I am slightly curious whether someone says something snarky about Common Core mathematics — or even the New Math for crying out loud — before or after someone finds a base other than ten that makes the symbols correct.

Cory Thomas’s college-set soap-opera strip Watch Your Head for the 28th name-drops Introduction to Functional Analysis. It won’t surprise you it’s a class nobody would take on impulse. It’s an upper-level undergraduate or a grad-student course, something only mathematics majors would find interesting. But it is very interesting. It’s the reward students have for making it through Real Analysis, the spirit-crushing course about why calculus works. Functional Analysis is about what we can do with functions. We can make them work like numbers. We can define addition and multiplication, we can measure their size, we can create sequences of them. We can treat functions almost as if they were numbers. And while we’re working on things more abstract and more exotic than the ordinary numbers Real Analysis depends on, somehow, Functional Analysis is easier than Real Analysis. It’s a wonder.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 29th features a student getting worried about the order of arithmetic operations. I appreciate how kids get worried about the feelings of things like that. Although, truly, subtraction doesn’t go “last”; addition and subtraction have the same priority. They share the bottom of the pile, though. Multiplication and division similarly share a priority, above addition-and-subtraction. Many guides to the order of operations say to do addition-and-subtraction in order left to right, but that’s not so. Setting a left-to-right order is okay for deciding where to start. But you could do a string of additions or subtractions in any order and get the same answer, unless the expression is inconsistent.

Daniel Beyer’s Long Story Short for the 30th of September, 2016. I think Randolph Itch, 2am did this joke too but then had everyone retire to the bar chart.

Daniel Beyer’s Long Story Short for the 30th is a pie chart joke. There’s not a lot of mathematics to it, but I’m amused.

Justin Boyd’s Invisible Bread for the 30th has maybe my favorite dumb joke of the week. It’s just a kite that’s proven its knowledge of mathematics. I’m a little surprised the kite didn’t call out a funnier number, by which I mean 37, but perhaps … no, that doesn’t work, actually. Of course the kite would be comfortable with higher mathematics.

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 1st of October, 2016. I don’t know that there even is a permanent link for this that would be any good.

And as promised, David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 1st of October mentions mathematics. That’s enough for me to include here.

Theorem Thursday: Liouville’s Approximation Theorem And How To Make Your Own Transcendental Number

As I get into the second month of Theorem Thursdays I have, I think, the whole roster of weeks sketched out. Today, I want to dive into some real analysis, and the study of numbers. It’s the sort of thing you normally get only if you’re willing to be a mathematics major. I’ll try to be readable by people who aren’t. If you carry through to the end and follow directions you’ll have your very own mathematical construct, too, so enjoy.

Liouville’s Approximation Theorem

It all comes back to polynomials. Of course it does. Polynomials aren’t literally everything in mathematics. They just come close. Among the things we can do with polynomials is divide up the real numbers into different sets. The tool we use is polynomials with integer coefficients. Integers are the positive and the negative whole numbers, stuff like ‘4’ and ‘5’ and ‘-12’ and ‘0’.

A polynomial is the sum of a bunch of products of coefficients multiplied by a variable raised to a power. We can use anything for the variable’s name. So we use ‘x’. Sometimes ‘t’. If we want complex-valued polynomials we use ‘z’. Some people trying to make a point will use ‘y’ or ‘s’ but they’re just showing off. Coefficients are just numbers. If we know the numbers, great. If we don’t know the numbers, or we want to write something that doesn’t commit us to any particular numbers, we use letters from the start of the alphabet. So we use ‘a’, maybe ‘b’ if we must. If we need a lot of numbers, we use subscripts: a0, a1, a2, and so on, up to some an for some big whole number n. To talk about one of these without committing ourselves to a specific example we use a subscript of i or j or k: aj, ak. It’s possible that aj and ak equal each other, but they don’t have to, unless j and k are the same whole number. They might also be zero, but they don’t have to be. They can be any numbers. Or, for this essay, they can be any integers. So we’d write a generic polynomial f(x) as:

$f(x) = a_0 + a_1 x + a_2 x^2 + a_3 x^3 + \cdots + a_{n - 1}x^{n - 1} + a_n x^n$

(Some people put the coefficients in the other order, that is, $a_n + a_{n - 1}x + a_{n - 2}x^2$ and so on. That’s not wrong. The name we give a number doesn’t matter. But it makes it harder to remember what coefficient matches up with, say, x14.)

A zero, or root, is a value for the variable (‘x’, or ‘t’, or what have you) which makes the polynomial equal to zero. It’s possible that ‘0’ is a zero, but don’t count on it. A polynomial of degree n — meaning the highest power to which x is raised is n — can have up to n different real-valued roots. All we’re going to care about is one.

Rational numbers are what we get by dividing one whole number by another. They’re numbers like 1/2 and 5/3 and 6. They’re numbers like -2.5 and 1.0625 and negative a billion. Almost none of the real numbers are rational numbers; they’re exceptional freaks. But they are all the numbers we actually compute with, once we start working out digits. Thus we remember that to live is to live paradoxically.

And every rational number is a root of a first-degree polynomial. That is, there’s some polynomial f(x) = a_0 + a_1 x that’s made zero for your polynomial. It’s easy to tell you what it is, too. Pick your rational number. You can write that as the integer p divided by the integer q. Now look at the polynomial f(x) = p – q x. Astounded yet?

That trick will work for any rational number. It won’t work for any irrational number. There’s no first-degree polynomial with integer coefficients that has the square root of two as a root. There are polynomials that do, though. There’s f(x) = 2 – x2. You can find the square root of two as the zero of a second-degree polynomial. You can’t find it as the zero of any lower-degree polynomials. So we say that this is an algebraic number of the second degree.

This goes on higher. Look at the cube root of 2. That’s another irrational number, so no first-degree polynomials have it as a root. And there’s no second-degree polynomials that have it as a root, not if we stick to integer coefficients. Ah, but f(x) = 2 – x3? That’s got it. So the cube root of two is an algebraic number of degree three.

We can go on like this, although I admit examples for higher-order algebraic numbers start getting hard to justify. Most of the numbers people have heard of are either rational or are order-two algebraic numbers. I can tell you truly that the eighth root of two is an eighth-degree algebraic number. But I bet you don’t feel enlightened. At best you feel like I’m setting up for something. The number r(5), the smallest radius a disc can have so that five of them will completely cover a disc of radius 1, is eighth-degree and that’s interesting. But you never imagined the number before and don’t have any idea how big that is, other than “I guess that has to be smaller than 1”. (It’s just a touch less than 0.61.) I sound like I’m wasting your time, although you might start doing little puzzles trying to make smaller coins cover larger ones. Do have fun.

Liouville’s Approximation Theorem is about approximating algebraic numbers with rational ones. Almost everything we ever do is with rational numbers. That’s all right because we can make the difference between the number we want, even if it’s r(5), and the numbers we can compute with, rational numbers, as tiny as we need. We trust that the errors we make from this approximation will stay small. And then we discover chaos science. Nothing is perfect.

For example, suppose we need to estimate π. Everyone knows we can approximate this with the rational number 22/7. That’s about 3.142857, which is all right but nothing great. Some people know we can approximate it as 333/106. (I didn’t until I started writing this paragraph and did some research.) That’s about 3.141509, which is better. Then there’s 355/113, which is not as famous as 22/7 but is a celebrity compared to 333/106. That’s about 3.141529. Then we get into some numbers only mathematics hipsters know: 103993/33102 and 104348/33215 and so on. Fine.

The Liouville Approximation Theorem is about sequences that converge on an irrational number. So we have our first approximation x1, that’s the integer p1 divided by the integer q1. So, 22 and 7. Then there’s the next approximation x2, that’s the integer p2 divided by the integer q2. So, 333 and 106. Then there’s the next approximation yet, x3, that’s the integer p3 divided by the integer q3. As we look at more and more approximations, xj‘s, we get closer and closer to the actual irrational number we want, in this case π. Also, the denominators, the qj‘s, keep getting bigger.

The theorem speaks of having an algebraic number, call it x, of some degree n greater than 1. Then we have this limit on how good an approximation can be. The difference between the number x that we want, and our best approximation p / q, has to be larger than the number (1/q)n + 1. The approximation might be higher than x. It might be lower than x. But it will be off by at least the n-plus-first power of 1/q.

Polynomials let us separate the real numbers into infinitely many tiers of numbers. They also let us say how well the most accessible tier of numbers, rational numbers, can approximate these more exotic things.

One of the things we learn by looking at numbers through this polynomial screen is that there are transcendental numbers. These are numbers that can’t be the root of any polynomial with integer coefficients. π is one of them. e is another. Nearly all numbers are transcendental. But the proof that any particular number is one is hard. Joseph Liouville showed that transcendental numbers must exist by using continued fractions. But this approximation theorem tells us how to make our own transcendental numbers. This won’t be any number you or anyone else has ever heard of, unless you pick a special case. But it will be yours.

You will need:

1. a1, an integer from 1 to 9, such as ‘1’, ‘9’, or ‘5’.
2. a2, another integer from 1 to 9. It may be the same as a1 if you like, but it doesn’t have to be.
3. a3, yet another integer from 1 to 9. It may be the same as a1 or a2 or, if it so happens, both.
4. a4, one more integer from 1 to 9 and you know what? Let’s summarize things a bit.
5. A whopping great big gob of integers aj, every one of them from 1 to 9, for every possible integer ‘j’ so technically this is infinitely many of them.
6. Comfort with the notation n!, which is the factorial of n. For whole numbers that’s the product of every whole number from 1 to n, so, 2! is 1 times 2, or 2. 3! is 1 times 2 times 3, or 6. 4! is 1 times 2 times 3 times 4, or 24. And so on.
7. Not to be thrown by me writing -n!. By that I mean work out n! and then multiply that by -1. So -2! is -2. -3! is -6. -4! is -24. And so on.

Now, assemble them into your very own transcendental number z, by this formula:

$z = a_1 \cdot 10^{-1} + a_2 \cdot 10^{-2!} + a_3 \cdot 10^{-3!} + a_4 \cdot 10^{-4!} + a_5 \cdot 10^{-5!} + a_6 \cdot 10^{-6!} \cdots$

If you’ve done it right, this will look something like:

$z = 0.a_{1}a_{2}000a_{3}00000000000000000a_{4}0000000 \cdots$

Ah, but, how do you know this is transcendental? We can prove it is. The proof is by contradiction, which is how a lot of great proofs are done. We show nonsense follows if the thing isn’t true, so the thing must be true. (There are mathematicians that don’t care for proof-by-contradiction. They insist on proof by charging straight ahead and showing a thing is true directly. That’s a matter of taste. I think every mathematician feels that way sometimes, to some extent or on some issues. The proof-by-contradiction is easier, at least in this case.)

Suppose that your z here is not transcendental. Then it’s got to be an algebraic number of degree n, for some finite number n. That’s what it means not to be transcendental. I don’t know what n is; I don’t care. There is some n and that’s enough.

Now, let’s let zm be a rational number approximating z. We find this approximation by taking the first m! digits after the decimal point. So, z1 would be just the number 0.a1. z2 is the number 0.a1a2. z3 is the number 0.a1a2000a3. I don’t know what m you like, but that’s all right. We’ll pick a nice big m.

So what’s the difference between z and zm? Well, it can’t be larger than 10 times 10-(m + 1)!. This is for the same reason that π minus 3.14 can’t be any bigger than 0.01.

Now suppose we have the best possible rational approximation, p/q, of your number z. Its first m! digits are going to be p / 10m!. This will be zm And by the Liouville Approximation Theorem, then, the difference between z and zm has to be at least as big as (1/10m!)(n + 1).

So we know the difference between z and zm has to be larger than one number. And it has to be smaller than another. Let me write those out.

$\frac{1}{10^{m! (n + 1)}} < |z - z_m | < \frac{10}{10^{(m + 1)!}}$

We don’t need the z – zm anymore. That thing on the rightmost side we can write what I’ll swear is a little easier to use. What we have left is:

$\frac{1}{10^{m! (n + 1)}} < \frac{1}{10^{(m + 1)! - 1}}$

And this will be true whenever the number m! (n + 1) is greater than (m + 1)! – 1 for big enough numbers m.

But there’s the thing. This isn’t true whenever m is greater than n. So the difference between your alleged transcendental number and its best-possible rational approximation has to be simultaneously bigger than a number and smaller than that same number without being equal to it. Supposing your number is anything but transcendental produces nonsense. Therefore, congratulations! You have a transcendental number.

If you chose all 1’s for your aj‘s, then you have what is sometimes called the Liouville Constant. If you didn’t, you may have a transcendental number nobody’s ever noticed before. You can name it after someone if you like. That’s as meaningful as naming a star for someone and cheaper. But you can style it as weaving someone’s name into the universal truth of mathematics. Enjoy!

I’m glad to finally give you a mathematics essay that lets you make something you can keep.

• Andrew Wearden 3:29 pm on Thursday, 30 June, 2016 Permalink | Reply

Admittedly, I do have an undergrad math degree, but I thought you did a good job explaining this. Out of curiosity, is there a reason you can’t use the integer ‘0’ when creating a transcendental number?

Liked by 1 person

• Joseph Nebus 6:45 am on Sunday, 3 July, 2016 Permalink | Reply

Thank you. I’m glad you followed.

If I’m not missing a trick there’s no reason you can’t slip a couple of zeroes in to the transcendental number. But there is a problem if you have nothing but zeroes after some point. If, say, everything from $a_9$ on were zero, then you’d have a rational number, which is as un-transcendental as it gets. So it’s easier to build a number without electing zeroes rather than work out a rule that allows zeroes only in non-dangerous configurations.

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Theorem Thursday: A First Fixed Point Theorem

I’m going to let the Mean Value Theorem slide a while. I feel more like a Fixed Point Theorem today. As with the Mean Value Theorem there’s several of these. Here I’ll start with an easy one.

The Fixed Point Theorem.

Back when the world and I were young I would play with electronic calculators. They encouraged play. They made it so easy to enter a number and hit an operation, and then hit that operation again, and again and again. Patterns appeared. Start with, say, ‘2’ and hit the ‘squared’ button, the smaller ‘2’ raised up from the key’s baseline. You got 4. And again: 16. And again: 256. And again and again and you got ever-huger numbers. This happened whenever you started from a number bigger than 1. Start from something smaller than 1, however tiny, and it dwindled down to zero, whatever you tried. Start at ‘1’ and it just stays there. The results were similar if you started with negative numbers. The first squaring put you in positive numbers and everything carried on as before.

This sort of thing happened a lot. Keep hitting the mysterious ‘exp’ and the numbers would keep growing forever. Keep hitting ‘sqrt’; if you started above 1, the numbers dwindled to 1. Start below and the numbers rise to 1. Or you started at zero, but who’s boring enough to do that? ‘log’ would start with positive numbers and keep dropping until it turned into a negative number. The next step was the calculator’s protest we were unleashing madness on the world.

But you didn’t always get zero, one, infinity, or madness, from repeatedly hitting the calculator button. Sometimes, some functions, you’d get an interesting number. If you picked any old number and hit cosine over and over the digits would eventually settle down to around 0.739085. Or -0.739085. Cosine’s great. Tangent … tangent is weird. Tangent does all sorts of bizarre stuff. But at least cosine is there, giving us this interesting number.

(Something you might wonder: this is the cosine of an angle measured in radians, which is how mathematicians naturally think of angles. Normal people measure angles in degrees, and that will have a different fixed point. We write both the cosine-in-radians and the cosine-in-degrees using the shorthand ‘cos’. We get away with this because people who are confused by this are too embarrassed to call us out on it. If we’re thoughtful we write, say, ‘cos x’ for radians and ‘cos x°’ for degrees. This makes the difference obvious. It doesn’t really, but at least we gave some hint to the reader.)

This all is an example of a fixed point theorem. Fixed point theorems turn up in a lot of fields. They were most impressed upon me in dynamical systems, studying how a complex system changes in time. A fixed point, for these problems, is an equilibrium. It’s where things aren’t changed by a process. You can see where that’s interesting.

In this series I haven’t stated theorems exactly much, and I haven’t given them real proofs. But this is an easy one to state and to prove. Start off with a function, which I’ll name ‘f’, because yes that is exactly how much effort goes in to naming functions. It has as a domain the interval [a, b] for some real numbers ‘a’ and ‘b’. And it has as rang the same interval, [a, b]. It might use the whole range; it might use only a subset of it. And we have to require that f is continuous.

Then there has to be at least one fixed point. There must be at last one number ‘c’, somewhere in the interval [a, b], for which f(c) equals c. There may be more than one; we don’t say anything about how many there are. And it can happen that c is equal to a. Or that c equals b. We don’t know that it is or that it isn’t. We just know there’s at least one ‘c’ that makes f(c) equal c.

You get that in my various examples. If the function f has the rule that any given x is matched to x2, then we do get two fixed points: f(0) = 02 = 0, and, f(1) = 12 = 1. Or if f has the rule that any given x is matched to the square root of x, then again we have: $f(0) = \sqrt{0} = 0$ and $f(1) = \sqrt{1} = 1$. Same old boring fixed points. The cosine is a little more interesting. For that we have $f(0.739085...) = \cos\left(0.739085...\right) = 0.739085...$.

How to prove it? The easiest way I know is to summon the Intermediate Value Theorem. Since I wrote a couple hundred words about that a few weeks ago I can assume you to understand it perfectly and have no question about how it makes this problem easy. I don’t even need to go on, do I?

… Yeah, fair enough. Well, here’s how to do it. We’ll take the original function f and create, based on it, a new function. We’ll dig deep in the alphabet and name that ‘g’. It has the same domain as f, [a, b]. Its range is … oh, well, something in the real numbers. Don’t care. The wonder comes from the rule we use.

The rule for ‘g’ is this: match the given number ‘x’ with the number ‘f(x) – x’. That is, g(a) equals whatever f(a) would be, minus a. g(b) equals whatever f(b) would be, minus b. We’re allowed to define a function in terms of some other function, as long as the symbols are meaningful. But we aren’t doing anything wrong like dividing by zero or taking the logarithm of a negative number or asking for f where it isn’t defined.

You might protest that we don’t know what the rule for f is. We’re told there is one, and that it’s a continuous function, but nothing more. So how can I say I’ve defined g in terms of a function I don’t know?

In the first place, I already know everything about f that I need to. I know it’s a continuous function defined on the interval [a, b]. I won’t use any more than that about it. And that’s great. A theorem that doesn’t require knowing much about a function is one that applies to more functions. It’s like the difference between being able to say something true of all living things in North America, and being able to say something true of all persons born in Redbank, New Jersey, on the 18th of February, 1944, who are presently between 68 and 70 inches tall and working on their rock operas. Both things may be true, but one of those things you probably use more.

In the second place, suppose I gave you a specific rule for f. Let me say, oh, f matches x with the arccosecant of x. Are you feeling any more enlightened now? Didn’t think so.

Back to g. Here’s some things we can say for sure about it. g is a function defined on the interval [a, b]. That’s how we set it up. Next point: g is a continuous function on the interval [a, b]. Remember, g is just the function f, which was continuous, minus x, which is also continuous. The difference of two continuous functions is still going to be continuous. (This is obvious, although it may take some considered thinking to realize why it is obvious.)

Now some interesting stuff. What is g(a)? Well, it’s whatever number f(a) is minus a. I can’t tell you what number that is. But I can tell you this: it’s not negative. Remember that f(a) has to be some number in the interval [a, b]. That is, it’s got to be no smaller than a. So the smallest f(a) can be is equal to a, in which case f(a) minus a is zero. And f(a) might be larger than a, in which case f(a) minus a is positive. So g(a) is either zero or a positive number.

(If you’ve just realized where I’m going and gasped in delight, well done. If you haven’t, don’t worry. You will. You’re just out of practice.)

What about g(b)? Since I don’t know what f(b) is, I can’t tell you what specific number it is. But I can tell you it’s not a positive number. The reasoning is just like above: f(b) is some number on the interval [a, b]. So the biggest number f(b) can equal is b. And in that case f(b) minus b is zero. If f(b) is any smaller than b, then f(b) minus b is negative. So g(b) is either zero or a negative number.

(Smiling at this? Good job. If you aren’t, again, not to worry. This sort of argument is not the kind of thing you do in Boring Algebra. It takes time and practice to think this way.)

And now the Intermediate Value Theorem works. g(a) is a positive number. g(b) is a negative number. g is continuous from a to b. Therefore, there must be some number ‘c’, between a and b, for which g(c) equals zero. And remember what g(c) means: f(c) – c equals 0. Therefore f(c) has to equal c. There has to be a fixed point.

And some tidying up. Like I said, g(a) might be positive. It might also be zero. But if g(a) is zero, then f(a) – a = 0. So a would be a fixed point. And similarly if g(b) is zero, then f(b) – b = 0. So then b would be a fixed point. The important thing is there must be at least some fixed point.

Now that calculator play starts taking on purposeful shape. Squaring a number could find a fixed point only if you started with a number from -1 to 1. The square of a number outside this range, such as ‘2’, would be bigger than you started with, and the Fixed Point Theorem doesn’t apply. Similarly with exponentials. But square roots? The square root of any number from 0 to a positive number ‘b’ is a number between 0 and ‘b’, at least as long as b was bigger than 1. So there was a fixed point, at 1. The cosine of a real number is some number between -1 and 1, and the cosines of all the numbers between -1 and 1 are themselves between -1 and 1. The Fixed Point Theorem applies. Tangent isn’t a continuous function. And the calculator play never settles on anything.

As with the Intermediate Value Theorem, this is an existence proof. It guarantees there is a fixed point. It doesn’t tell us how to find one. Calculator play does, though. Start from any old number that looks promising and work out f for that number. Then take that and put it back into f. And again. And again. This is known as “fixed point iteration”. It won’t give you the exact answer.

Not usually, anyway. In some freak cases it will. But what it will give, provided some extra conditions are satisfied, is a sequence of values that get closer and closer to the fixed point. When you’re close enough, then you stop calculating. How do you know you’re close enough? If you know something about the original f you can work out some logically rigorous estimates. Or you just keep calculating until all the decimal points you want stop changing between iterations. That’s not logically sound, but it’s easy to program.

That won’t always work. It’ll only work if the function f is differentiable on the interval (a, b). That is, it can’t have corners. And there have to be limits on how fast the function changes on the interval (a, b). If the function changes too fast, iteration can’t be guaranteed to work. But often if we’re interested in a function at all then these conditions will be true, or we can think of a related function that for which they are true.

And even if it works it won’t always work well. It can take an enormous pile of calculations to get near the fixed point. But this is why we have computers, and why we can leave them to work overnight.

And yet such a simple idea works. It appears in ancient times, in a formula for finding the square root of an arbitrary positive number ‘N’. (Find the fixed point for $f(x) = \frac{1}{2}\left(\frac{N}{x} + x\right)$). It creeps into problems that don’t look like fixed points. Calculus students learn of something called the Newton-Raphson Iteration. It finds roots, points where a function f(x) equals zero. Mathematics majors learn of numerical methods to solve ordinary differential equations. The most stable of these are again fixed-point iteration schemes, albeit in disguise.

Theorem Thursday: One Mean Value Theorem Of Many

For this week I have something I want to follow up on. We’ll see if I make it that far.

The Mean Value Theorem.

My subject line disagrees with the header just above here. I want to talk about the Mean Value Theorem. It’s one of those things that turns up in freshman calculus and then again in Analysis. It’s introduced as “the” Mean Value Theorem. But like many things in calculus it comes in several forms. So I figure to talk about one of them here, and another form in a while, when I’ve had time to make up drawings.

Calculus can split effortlessly into two kinds of things. One is differential calculus. This is the study of continuity and smoothness. It studies how a quantity changes if someting affecting it changes. It tells us how to optimize things. It tells us how to approximate complicated functions with simpler ones. Usually polynomials. It leads us to differential equations, problems in which the rate at which something changes depends on what value the thing has.

The other kind is integral calculus. This is the study of shapes and areas. It studies how infinitely many things, all infinitely small, add together. It tells us what the net change in things are. It tells us how to go from information about every point in a volume to information about the whole volume.

They aren’t really separate. Each kind informs the other, and gives us tools to use in studying the other. And they are almost mirrors of one another. Differentials and integrals are not quite inverses, but they come quite close. And as a result most of the important stuff you learn in differential calculus has an echo in integral calculus. The Mean Value Theorem is among them.

The Mean Value Theorem is a rule about functions. In this case it’s functions with a domain that’s an interval of the real numbers. I’ll use ‘a’ as the name for the smallest number in the domain and ‘b’ as the largest number. People talking about the Mean Value Theorem often do. The range is also the real numbers, although it doesn’t matter which ones.

I’ll call the function ‘f’ in accord with a longrunning tradition of not working too hard to name functions. What does matter is that ‘f’ is continuous on the interval [a, b]. I’ve described what ‘continuous’ means before. It means that here too.

And we need one more thing. The function f has to be differentiable on the interval (a, b). You maybe noticed that before I wrote [a, b], and here I just wrote (a, b). There’s a difference here. We need the function to be continuous on the “closed” interval [a, b]. That is, it’s got to be continuous for ‘a’, for ‘b’, and for every point in-between.

But we only need the function to be differentiable on the “open” interval (a, b). That is, it’s got to be continuous for all the points in-between ‘a’ and ‘b’. If it happens to be differentiable for ‘a’, or for ‘b’, or for both, that’s great. But we won’t turn away a function f for not being differentiable at those points. Only the interior. That sort of distinction between stuff true on the interior and stuff true on the boundaries is common. This is why mathematicians have words for “including the boundaries” (“closed”) and “never minding the boundaries” (“open”).

As to what “differentiable” is … A function is differentiable at a point if you can take its derivative at that point. I’m sure that clears everything up. There are many ways to describe what differentiability is. One that’s not too bad is to imagine zooming way in on the curve representing a function. If you start with a big old wobbly function it waves all around. But pick a point. Zoom in on that. Does the function stay all wobbly, or does it get more steady, more straight? Keep zooming in. Does it get even straighter still? If you zoomed in over and over again on the curve at some point, would it look almost exactly like a straight line?

If it does, then the function is differentiable at that point. It has a derivative there. The derivative’s value is whatever the slope of that line is. The slope is that thing you remember from taking Boring Algebra in high school. That rise-over-run thing. But this derivative is a great thing to know. You could approximate the original function with a straight line, with slope equal to that derivative. Close to that point, you’ll make a small enough error nobody has to worry about it.

That there will be this straight line approximation isn’t true for every function. Here’s an example. Picture a line that goes up and then takes a 90-degree turn to go back down again. Look at the corner. However close you zoom in on the corner, there’s going to be a corner. It’s never going to look like a straight line; there’s a 90-degree angle there. It can be a smaller angle if you like, but any sort of corner breaks this differentiability. This is a point where the function isn’t differentiable.

There are functions that are nothing but corners. They can be differentiable nowhere, or only at a tiny set of points that can be ignored. (A set of measure zero, as the dialect would put it.) Mathematicians discovered this over the course of the 19th century. They got into some good arguments about how that can even make sense. It can get worse. Also found in the 19th century were functions that are continuous only at a single point. This smashes just about everyone’s intuition. But we can’t find a definition of continuity that’s as useful as the one we use now and avoids that problem. So we accept that it implies some pathological conclusions and carry on as best we can.

Now I get to the Mean Value Theorem in its differential calculus pelage. It starts with the endpoints, ‘a’ and ‘b’, and the values of the function at those points, ‘f(a)’ and ‘f(b)’. And from here it’s easiest to figure what’s going on if you imagine the plot of a generic function f. I recommend drawing one. Just make sure you draw it without lifting the pen from paper, and without including any corners anywhere. Something wiggly.

Draw the line that connects the ends of the wiggly graph. Formally, we’re adding the line segment that connects the points with coordinates (a, f(a)) and (b, f(b)). That’s coordinate pairs, not intervals. That’s clear in the minds of the mathematicians who don’t see why not to use parentheses over and over like this. (We are short on good grouping symbols like parentheses and brackets and braces.)

Per the Mean Value Theorem, there is at least one point whose derivative is the same as the slope of that line segment. If you were to slide the line up or down, without changing its orientation, you’d find something wonderful. Most of the time this line intersects the curve, crossing from above to below or vice-versa. But there’ll be at least one point where the shifted line is “tangent”, where it just touches the original curve. Close to that touching point, the “tangent point”, the shifted line and the curve blend together and can’t be easily told apart. As long as the function is differentiable on the open interval (a, b), and continuous on the closed interval [a, b], this will be true. You might convince yourself of it by drawing a couple of curves and taking a straightedge to the results.

This is an existence theorem. Like the Intermediate Value Theorem, it doesn’t tell us which point, or points, make the thing we’re interested in true. It just promises us that there is some point that does it. So it gets used in other proofs. It lets us mix information about intervals and information about points.

It’s tempting to try using it numerically. It looks as if it justifies a common differential-calculus trick. Suppose we want to know the value of the derivative at a point. We could pick a little interval around that point and find the endpoints. And then find the slope of the line segment connecting the endpoints. And won’t that be close enough to the derivative at the point we care about?

Well. Um. No, we really can’t be sure about that. We don’t have any idea what interval might make the derivative of the point we care about equal to this line-segment slope. The Mean Value Theorem won’t tell us. It won’t even tell us if there exists an interval that would let that trick work. We can’t invoke the Mean Value Theorem to let us get away with that.

Often, though, we can get away with it. Differentiable functions do have to follow some rules. Among them is that if you do pick a small enough interval then approximations that look like this will work all right. If the function flutters around a lot, we need a smaller interval. But a lot of the functions we’re interested in don’t flutter around that much. So we can get away with it. And there’s some grounds to trust in getting away with it. The Mean Value Theorem isn’t any part of the grounds. It just looks so much like it ought to be.

I hope on a later Thursday to look at an integral-calculus form of the Mean Value Theorem.

Theorem Thursday: The Intermediate Value Theorem

I am still taking requests for this Theorem Thursdays sequence. I intend to post each Thursday in June and July an essay talking about some theorem and what it means and why it’s important. I have gotten a couple of requests in, but I’m happy to take more; please just give me a little lead time. But I want to start with one that delights me.

The Intermediate Value Theorem

I own a Scion tC. It’s a pleasant car, about 2400 percent more sporty than I am in real life. I got it because it met my most important criteria: it wasn’t expensive and it had a sun roof. That it looks stylish is an unsought bonus.

But being a car, and a black one at that, it has a common problem. Leave it parked a while, then get inside. In the winter, it gets so cold that snow can fall inside it. In the summer, it gets so hot that the interior, never mind the passengers, risk melting. While pondering this slight inconvenience I wondered, isn’t there any outside temperature that leaves my car comfortable?

My Scion tC, here, not too warm.

Of course there is. We know this before thinking about it. The sun heats the car, yes. When the outside temperature is low enough, there’s enough heat flowing out that the car gets cold. When the outside temperature’s high enough, not enough heat flows out. The car stays warm. There must be some middle temperature where just enough heat flows out that the interior doesn’t get particularly warm or cold. Not just one middle temperature, come to that. There is a range of temperatures that are comfortable to sit in. But that just means there’s a range of outside temperatures for which the car’s interior stays comfortable. We know this range as late April, early May, here. Most years, anyway.

The reasoning that lets us know there is a comfort-producing outside temperature we can see as a use of the Intermediate Value Theorem. It addresses a function f with domain [a, b], and range of the real numbers. The domain is closed; that is, the numbers we call ‘a’ and ‘b’ are both in the set. And f has to be a continuous function. If you want to draw it, you can do so without having to lift pen from paper. (WARNING: Do not attempt to pass your Real Analysis course with that definition. But that’s what the proper definition means.)

So look at the numbers f(a) and f(b). Pick some number between them, and I’ll call that number ‘g’. There must be at least one number ‘c’, that’s between ‘a’ and ‘b’, and for which f(c) equals g.

Bernard Bolzano, an early-19th century mathematician/logician/theologist/priest, gets the credit for first proving this theorem. Bolzano’s version was a little different. It supposes that f(a) and f(b) are of opposite sign. That is, f(a) is a positive and f(b) a negative number. Or f(a) is negative and f(b) is positive. And Bolzano’s theorem says there must be some number ‘c’ for which f(c) is zero.

You can prove this by drawing any wiggly curve at all and then a horizontal line in the middle of it. Well, that doesn’t prove it to mathematician’s satisfaction. But it will prove the matter in the sense that you’ll be convinced. It’ll also convince anyone you try explaining this to.

Any old real-valued function, drawn in blue. The number ‘g’ is something between the number f(a) and f(b). And somewhere there’s at least one number, between a and b, for where the function’s equal to g.

You might wonder why anyone needed this proved at all. It’s a bit like proving that as you pour water into the sink there’ll come a time the last dish gets covered with water. So it is. The need for a proof came about from the ongoing attempt to make mathematics rigorous. We have an intuitive idea of what it means for functions to be continuous; see my above comment about lifting pens from paper. Can that be put in terms that don’t depend on physical intuition? … Yes, it can. And we can divorce the Intermediate Value Theorem from our physical intuitions. We can know something that’s true even if we never see a car or a sink.

This theorem might leave you feeling a little hollow inside. Proving that there is some ‘c’ for which f(c) equals g, or even equals zero, doesn’t seem to tell us much about how to find it. It doesn’t even tell us that there’s only one ‘c’, rather than two or three or a hundred million candidates that meet our criteria. Fair enough. The Intermediate Value Theorem is more about proving the existence of solutions, rather than how to find them.

But knowing there is a solution can help us find them. The Intermediate Value Theorem as we know it grew out of finding roots for polynomials. One numerical method, easy to set up for any problem, is the bisection method. If you know that somewhere between ‘a’ and ‘b’ the function goes from positive to negative, then find the midpoint, ‘c’. The function is equal to zero either between ‘a’ and ‘c’, or between ‘c’ and ‘b’. Pick the side that it’s on, and bisect that. Pick the half of that which the zero must be in. Bisect that half. And repeat until you get close enough to the answer for your needs. (The same reasoning applies to a lot of problems in which you divide the search range in two each time until the answer appears.)

We can get some pretty heady results from the Intermediate Value Theorem, too, even if we don’t know where any of them are. An example you’ll see everywhere is that there must be spots on the opposite sides of the globe with the exact same temperature. Or humidity, or daily rainfall, or any other quantity like that. I had thought everyone was ripping that example off from Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins’s masterpiece What Is Mathematics?. But I can’t find this particular example in there. I wonder what we are all ripping it off from.

Does this magenta line bisect both the red and the greyish blobs simultaneously? … Probably not, unless I’ve been way lucky. But there is some line that does.

So here’s a neat example that is ripped off from them. Draw two blobs on the plane. Is there a straight line that bisects both of them at once? Bisecting here means there’s exactly as much of one blob on one side of the line as on the other. There certainly is. The trick is there are any number of lines that will bisect one blob, and then look at what that does to the other.

A similar ripped-off result you can do with a single blob of any shape you like. Draw any line that bisects it. There are a lot of candidates. Can you draw a line perpendicular to that so that the blob gets quartered, divided into four spots of equal area? Yes. Try it.

Does this pair of magenta lines split this blue blob into four pieces of exactly the same area? … Probably not, unless I’ve been lucky. But there is some pair of perpendicular lines that will do it. Also, is it me or does that blob look kind of like a butterfly?

But surely the best use of the Intermediate Value Theorem is in the problem of wobbly tables. If the table has four legs, all the same length, and the problem is the floor isn’t level it’s all right. There is some way to adjust the table so it won’t wobble. (Well, the ground can’t be angled more than a bit over 35 degrees, but that’s all right. If the ground has a 35 degree angle you aren’t setting a table on it. You’re rolling down it.) Finally a mathematical proof can save us from despair!

Except that the proof doesn’t work if the table legs are uneven which, alas, they often are. But we can’t get everything.

Courant and Robbins put forth one more example that’s fantastic, although it doesn’t quite work. But it’s a train problem unlike those you’ve seen before. Let me give it to you as they set it out:

Suppose a train travels from station A to station B along a straight section of track. The journey need not be of uniform speed or acceleration. The train may act in any manner, speeding up, slowing down, coming to a halt, or even backing up for a while, before reaching B. But the exact motion of the train is supposed to be known in advance; that is, the function s = f(t) is given, where s is the distance of the train from station A, and t is the time, measured from the instant of departure.

On the floor of one of the cars a rod is pivoted so that it may move without friction either forward or backward until it touches the floor. If it does touch the floor, we assume that it remains on the floor henceforth; this wil be the case if the rod does not bounce.

Is it possible to place the rod in such a position that, if it is released at the instant when the train starts and allowed to move solely under the influence of gravity and the motion of the train, it will not fall to the floor during the entire journey from A to B?

They argue it is possible, and use the Intermediate Value Theorem to show it. They admit the range of angles it’s safe to start the rod from may be too small to be useful.

But they’re not quite right. Ian Stewart, in the revision of What Is Mathematics?, includes an appendix about this. Stewart credits Tim Poston with pointing out, in 1976, the flaw. It’s possible to imagine a path which causes the rod, from one angle, to just graze tipping over, let’s say forward, and then get yanked back and fall over flat backwards. This would leave no room for any starting angles that avoid falling over entirely.

It’s a subtle flaw. You might expect so. Nobody mentioned it between the book’s original publication in 1941, after which everyone liking mathematics read it, and 1976. And it is one that touches on the complications of spaces. This little Intermediate Value Theorem problem draws us close to chaos theory. It’s one of those ideas that weaves through all mathematics.

A Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Polynomials

I have another request for today’s Leap Day Mathematics A To Z term. Gaurish asked for something exciting. This should be less challenging than Dedekind Domains. I hope.

Polynomials.

Polynomials are everything. Everything in mathematics, anyway. If humans study it, it’s a polynomial. If we know anything about a mathematical construct, it’s because we ran across it while trying to understand polynomials.

I exaggerate. A tiny bit. Maybe by three percent. But polynomials are big.

They’re easy to recognize. We can get them in pre-algebra. We make them out of a set of numbers called coefficients and one or more variables. The coefficients are usually either real numbers or complex-valued numbers. The variables we usually allow to be either real or complex-valued numbers. We take each coefficient and multiply it by some power of each variable. And we add all that up. So, polynomials are things that look like these things:

$x^2 - 2x + 1$
$12 x^4 + 2\pi x^2 y^3 - 4x^3 y - \sqrt{6}$
$\ln(2) + \frac{1}{2}\left(x - 2\right) - \frac{1}{2 \cdot 2^2}\left(x - 2\right)^2 + \frac{1}{2 \cdot 2^3}\left(x - 2\right)^3 - \frac{1}{2 \cdot 2^4}\left(x - 2\right)^4 + \cdots$
$a_n x^n + a_{n - 1}x^{n - 1} + a_{n - 2}x^{n - 2} + \cdots + a_2 x^2 + a_1 x^1 + a_0$

The first polynomial maybe looks nice and comfortable. The second may look a little threatening, what with it having two variables and a square root in it, but it’s not too weird. The third is an infinitely long polynomial; you’re supposed to keep going on in that pattern, adding even more terms. The last is a generic representation of a polynomial. Each number a0, a1, a2, et cetera is some coefficient that we in principle know. It’s a good way of representing a polynomial when we want to work with it but don’t want to tie ourselves down to a particular example. The highest power we raise a variable to we call the degree of the polynomial. A second-degree polynomial, for example, has an x2 in it, but not an x3 or x4 or x18 or anything like that. A third-degree polynomial has an x3, but not x to any higher powers. Degree is a useful way of saying roughly how long a polynomial is, so it appears all over discussions of polynomials.

But why do we like polynomials? Why like them so much that MathWorld lists 1,163 pages that mention polynomials?

It’s because they’re great. They do everything we’d ever want to do and they’re great at it. We can add them together as easily as we add regular old numbers. We can subtract them as well. We can multiply and divide them. There’s even prime polynomials, just like there are prime numbers. They take longer to work out, but they’re not harder.

And they do great stuff in advanced mathematics too. In calculus we want to take derivatives of functions. Polynomials, we always can. We get another polynomial out of that. So we can keep taking derivatives, as many as we need. (We might need a lot of them.) We can integrate too. The integration produces another polynomial. So we can keep doing that as long as we need too. (We need to do this a lot, too.) This lets us solve so many problems in calculus, which is about how functions work. It also lets us solve so many problems in differential equations, which is about systems whose change depends on the current state of things.

That’s great for analyzing polynomials, but what about things that aren’t polynomials?

Well, if a function is continuous, then it might as well be a polynomial. To be a little more exact, we can set a margin of error. And we can always find polynomials that are less than that margin of error away from the original function. The original function might be annoying to deal with. The polynomial that’s as close to it as we want, though, isn’t.

Not every function is continuous. Most of them aren’t. But most of the functions we want to do work with are, or at least are continuous in stretches. Polynomials let us understand the functions that describe most real stuff.

Nice for mathematicians, all right, but how about for real uses? How about for calculations?

Oh, polynomials are just magnificent. You know why? Because you can evaluate any polynomial as soon as you can add and multiply. (Also subtract, but we think of that as addition.) Remember, x4 just means “x times x times x times x”, four of those x’s in the product. All these polynomials are easy to evaluate.

Even better, we don’t have to evaluate them. We can automate away the evaluation. It’s easy to set a calculator doing this work, and it will do it without complaint and with few unforeseeable mistakes.

Now remember that thing where we can make a polynomial close enough to any continuous function? And we can always set a calculator to evaluate a polynomial? Guess that this means about continuous functions. We have a tool that lets us calculate stuff we would want to know. Things like arccosines and logarithms and Bessel functions and all that. And we get nice easy to understand numbers out of them. For example, that third polynomial I gave you above? That’s not just infinitely long. It’s also a polynomial that approximates the natural logarithm. Pick a positive number x that’s between 0 and 4 and put it in that polynomial. Calculate terms and add them up. You’ll get closer and closer to the natural logarithm of that number. You’ll get there faster if you pick a number near 2, but you’ll eventually get there for whatever number you pick. (Calculus will tell us why x has to be between 0 and 4. Don’t worry about it for now.)

So through polynomials we can understand functions, analytically and numerically.

And they keep revealing things to us. We discovered complex-valued numbers because we wanted to find roots, values of x that make a polynomial of x equal to zero. Some formulas worked well for third- and fourth-degree polynomials. (They look like the quadratic formula, which solves second-degree polynomials. The big difference is nobody remembers what they are without looking them up.) But the formulas sometimes called for things that looked like square roots of negative numbers. Absurd! But if you carried on as if these square roots of negative numbers meant something, you got meaningful answers. And correct answers.

We wanted formulas to solve fifth- and higher-degree polynomials exactly. We can do this with second and third and fourth-degree polynomials, after all. It turns out we can’t. Oh, we can solve some of them exactly. The attempt to understand why, though, helped us create and shape group theory, the study of things that look like but aren’t numbers.

Polynomials go on, sneaking into everything. We can look at a square matrix and discover its characteristic polynomial. This allows us to find beautifully-named things like eigenvalues and eigenvectors. These reveal secrets of the matrix’s structure. We can find polynomials in the formulas that describe how many ways to split up a group of things into a smaller number of sets. We can find polynomials that describe how networks of things are connected. We can find polynomials that describe how a knot is tied. We can even find polynomials that distinguish between a knot and the knot’s reflection in the mirror.

Polynomials are everything.

• gaurish 3:40 pm on Monday, 4 April, 2016 Permalink | Reply

Beautiful post!
Recently I studied Taylor’s Theorem & Weierstrass approximation theorem. These theorems illustrate your ideas :)

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• Joseph Nebus 6:38 pm on Monday, 4 April, 2016 Permalink | Reply

Thank you kindly. And yeah, the Taylor Theorem and Weierstrauss Approximation Theorem are the ideas I was sneaking around without trying to get too technical. (Maybe I should start including a postscript of technical talk to these essays.)

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Things To Be Thankful For

A couple buildings around town have blackboard paint and a writing prompt on the walls. Here’s one my love and I wandered across the other day while going to Fabiano’s Chocolate for the obvious reason. (The reason was to see their novelty three-foot-tall, 75-pound solid chocolate bunny. Also to buy less huge piles of candy.)

I do not know who in this context J D McCarthy is.

I recognized that mathematics majors had been past. Well, anyone with an interest in popular mathematics might have written they’re grateful for “G. Cantor”. His work’s escaped into the popular imagination, at least a bit. “C. Weirstrauβ”, though, that’s a mathematics major at work.

Karl Weierstrass, the way his name’s rendered in the English-language mathematics books I know, was one of the people who made analysis what it is today. Analysis is, at heart, the study of why calculus works. He attacked the foundations of calculus, which by modern standards weren’t quite rigorous. And he did brilliantly, giving us the modern standards of rigor. He’s terrified generations of mathematics majors by defining what it is for a function to be continuous. Roughly, it means we can draw the graph of a function without having to lift a pencil. He put it in a non-rough manner. He also developed the precise modern idea for what a limit is. Roughly, a limit is exactly what you might think it means; but to be precise takes genius.

Among Weierstrass’s students was Georg Cantor. His is a more familiar name. He proved that just because a set has infinitely many elements in it doesn’t mean that it can’t be quite small compared to other infinitely large sets. His Diagonal Argument shows there must be, in a sense, more real numbers than there are counting numbers. And a child can understand it. Cantor also pioneered the modern idea of set theory. For a while this looked like it might be the best way to understand why arithmetic works like it does. (My understanding is it’s now thought category theory more fundamental. But I don’t know category theory well enough to have an informed opinion.)

The person grateful to Michigan State University basketball I assume wrote that before last Sunday, when the school wrecked so many NCAA tournament brackets.

A Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Dedekind Domain

When I tossed this season’s A To Z open to requests I figured I’d get some surprising ones. So I did. This one’s particularly challenging. It comes fro Gaurish Korpal, author of the Gaurish4Math blog.

Dedekind Domain

A major field of mathematics is Algebra. By this mathematicians don’t mean algebra. They mean studying collections of things on which you can do stuff that looks like arithmetic. There’s good reasons why this field has that confusing name. Nobody knows what they are.

We’ve seen before the creation of things that look a bit like arithmetic. Rings are a collection of things for which we can do something that works like addition and something that works like multiplication. There are a lot of different kinds of rings. When a mathematics popularizer tries to talk about rings, she’ll talk a lot about the whole numbers. We can usually count on the audience to know what they are. If that won’t do for the particular topic, she’ll try the whole numbers modulo something. If she needs another example then she talks about the ways you can rotate or reflect a triangle, or square, or hexagon and get the original shape back. Maybe she calls on the sets of polynomials you can describe. Then she has to give up on words and make do with pictures of beautifully complicated things. And after that she has to give up because the structures get too abstract to describe without losing the audience.

Dedekind Domains are a kind of ring that meets a bunch of extra criteria. There’s no point my listing them all. It would take several hundred words and you would lose motivation to continue before I was done. If you need them anyway Eric W Weisstein’s MathWorld dictionary gives the exact criteria. It also has explanations for all the words in those criteria.

Dedekind Domains, also called Dedekind Rings, are aptly named for Richard Dedekind. He was a 19th century mathematician, the last doctoral student of Gauss, and one of the people who defined what we think of as algebra. He also gave us a rigorous foundation for what irrational numbers are.

Among the problems that fascinated Dedekind was Fermat’s Last Theorem. This can’t surprise you. Every person who would be a mathematician is fascinated by it. We take our innings fiddling with cases and ways to show an + bn can’t equal cn for interesting whole numbers a, b, c, and n. We usually go about this by saying, “Suppose we have the smallest a, b, and c for which this is true and for which n is bigger than 2”. Then we do a lot of scribbling that shows this implies something contradictory, like an even number equals an odd, or that there’s some set of smaller numbers making this true. This proves the original supposition was false. Mathematicians first learn that trick as a way to show the square root of two can’t be a rational number. We stick with it because it’s nice and familiar and looks relevant. Most of us get maybe as far as proving there aren’t any solutions for n = 3 or maybe n = 4 and go on to other work. Dedekind didn’t prove the theorem. But he did find new ways to look at numbers.

One problem with proving Fermat’s Last Theorem is that it’s all about integers. Integers are hard to prove things about. Real numbers are easier. Complex-valued numbers are easier still. This is weird but it’s so. So we have this promising approach: if we could prove something like Fermat’s Last Theorem for complex-valued numbers, we’d get it up for integers. Or at least we’d be a lot of the way there. The one flaw is that Fermat’s Last Theorem isn’t true for complex-valued numbers. It would be ridiculous if it were true.

But we can patch things up. We can construct something called Gaussian Integers. These are complex-valued numbers which we can match up to integers in a compelling way. We could use the tools that work on complex-valued numbers to squeeze out a result about integers.

You know that this didn’t work. If it had, we wouldn’t have had to wait for the 1990s for the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. And that proof would have anything to do with this stuff. It hasn’t. One of the problems keeping this kind of proof from working is factoring. Whole numbers are either prime numbers or the product of prime numbers. Or they’re 1, ruled out of the universe of prime numbers for reasons I get to after the next paragraph. Prime numbers are those like 2, 5, 13, 37 and many others. They haven’t got any factors besides themselves and 1. The other whole numbers are the products of prime numbers. 12 is equal to 2 times 2 times 3. 35 is equal to 5 times 7. 165 is equal to 3 times 5 times 11.

If we stick to whole numbers, then, these all have unique prime factorizations. 24 is equal to 2 times 2 times 2 times 3. And there are no other combinations of prime numbers that multiply together to give us 24. We could rearrange the numbers — 2 times 3 times 2 times 2 works. But it will always be a combination of three 2’s and a single 3 that we multiply together to get 24.

(This is a reason we don’t consider 1 a prime number. If we did consider a prime number, then “three 2’s and a single 3” would be a prime factorization of 24, but so would “three 2’s, a single 3, and two 1’s”. Also “three 2’s, a single 3, and fifteen 1’s”. Also “three 2’s, a single 3, and one 1”. We have a lot of theorems that depend on whole numbers having a unique prime factorization. We could add the phrase “except for the count of 1’s in the factorization” to every occurrence of the phrase “prime factorization”. Or we could say that 1 isn’t a prime number. It’s a lot less work to say 1 isn’t a prime number.)

The trouble is that if we work with Gaussian integers we don’t have that unique prime factorization anymore. There are still prime numbers. But it’s possible to get some numbers as a product of different sets of prime numbers. And this point breaks a lot of otherwise promising attempts to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem. And there’s no getting around that, not for Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Dedekind saw a good concept lurking under this, though. The concept is called an ideal. It’s a subset of a ring that itself satisfies the rules for being a ring. And if you take something from the original ring and multiply it by something in the ideal, you get something that’s still in the ideal. You might already have one in mind. Start with the ring of integers. The even numbers are an ideal of that. Add any two even numbers together and you get an even number. Multiply any two even numbers together and you get an even number. Take any integer, even or not, and multiply it by an even number. You get an even number.

(If you were wondering: I mean the ideal would be a “ring without identity”. It’s not required to have something that acts like 1 for the purpose of multiplication. If we insisted on looking at the even numbers and the number 1, then we couldn’t be sure that adding two things from the ideal would stay in the ideal. After all, 2 is in the ideal, and if 1 also is, then 2 + 1 is a peculiar thing to consider an even number.)

It’s not just even numbers that do this. The multiples of 3 make an ideal in the integers too. Add two multiples of 3 together and you get a multiple of 3. Multiply two multiples of 3 together and you get another multiple of 3. Multiply any integer by a multiple of 3 and you get a multiple of 3.

The multiples of 4 also make an ideal, as do the multiples of 5, or the multiples of 82, or of any whole number you like.

Odd numbers don’t make an ideal, though. Add two odd numbers together and you don’t get an odd number. Multiply an integer by an odd number and you might get an odd number, you might not.

And not every ring has an ideal lurking within it. For example, take the integers modulo 3. In this case there are only three numbers: 0, 1, and 2. 1 + 1 is 2, uncontroversially. But 1 + 2 is 0. 2 + 2 is 1. 2 times 1 is 2, but 2 times 2 is 1 again. This is self-consistent. But it hasn’t got an ideal within it. There isn’t a smaller set that has addition work.

The multiples of 4 make an interesting ideal in the integers. They’re not just an ideal of the integers. They’re also an ideal of the even numbers. Well, the even numbers make a ring. They couldn’t be an ideal of the integers if they couldn’t be a ring in their own right. And the multiples of 4 — well, multiply any even number by a multiple of 4. You get a multiple of 4 again. This keeps on going. The multiples of 8 are an ideal for the multiples of 4, the multiples of 2, and the integers. Multiples of 16 and 32 make for even deeper nestings of ideals.

The multiples of 6, now … that’s an ideal of the integers, for all the reasons the multiples of 2 and 3 and 4 were. But it’s also an ideal of the multiples of 2. And of the multiples of 3. We can see the collection of “things that are multiples of 6” as a product of “things that are multiples of 2” and “things that are multiples of 3”. Dedekind saw this before us.

You might want to pause a moment while considering the idea of multiplying whole sets of numbers together. It’s a heady concept. Trying to do proofs with the concept feels at first like being tasked with alphabetizing a cloud. But we’re not planning to prove anything so you can move on if you like with an unalphabetized cloud.

A Dedekind Domain is a ring that has ideals like this. And the ideals come in two categories. Some are “prime ideals”, which act like prime numbers do. The non-prime ideals are the products of prime ideals. And while we might not have unique prime factorizations of numbers, we do have unique prime factorizations of ideals. That is, if an ideal is a product of some set of prime ideals, then it can’t also be the product of some other set of prime ideals. We get back something like unique factors.

This may sound abstract. But you know a Dedekind Domain. The integers are one. That wasn’t a given. Yes, we start algebra by looking for things that work like regular arithmetic do. But that doesn’t promise that regular old numbers will still satisfy us. We can, for instance, study things where the order matters in multiplication. Then multiplying one thing by a second gives us a different answer to multiplying the second thing by the first. Still, regular old integers are Dedekind domains and it’s hard to think of being more familiar than that.

Another example is the set of polynomials. You might want to pause for a moment here. Mathematics majors need a pause to start thinking of polynomials as being something kind of like regular old numbers. But you can certainly add one polynomial to another, and you get a polynomial out of it. You can multiply one polynomial by another, and you get a polynomial out of that. Try it. After that the only surprise would be that there are prime polynomials. But if you try to think of two polynomials that multiply together to give you “x + 1” you realize there have to be.

Other examples start getting more exotic. They’re things like the Gaussian integers I mentioned before. Gaussian integers are themselves an example of a structure called algebraic integers. Algebraic integers are — well, think of all the polynomials you can out of integer coefficients, and with a leading coefficient of 1. So, polynomials that look like “x3 – 4 x2 + 15 x + 6” or the like. All of the roots of those, the values of x which make that expression equal to zero, are algebraic integers. Yes, almost none of them are integers. We know. But the algebraic integers are also a Dedekind Domain.

I’d like to describe some more Dedekind Domains. I am foiled. I can find some more, but explaining them outside the dialect of mathematics is hard. It would take me more words than I am confident readers will give me.

I hope you are satisfied to know a bit of what a Dedekind Domain is. It is a kind of thing which works much like integers do. But a Dedekind Domain can be just different enough that we can’t count on factoring working like we are used to. We don’t lose factoring altogether, though. We are able to keep an attenuated version. It does take quite a few words to explain exactly how to set this up, however.

• gaurish 3:33 pm on Monday, 7 March, 2016 Permalink | Reply

Wow! I just couldn’t believe my eyes while reading this post. It’s beautiful. Thanks for satisfying my curiosity. :)

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• Joseph Nebus 7:54 am on Wednesday, 9 March, 2016 Permalink | Reply

I’m glad to be of service, and I hope that you were satisfied. I’d tried a couple times to find a way to describe all the properties of a Dedekind domain in conversational English, and gave up with reluctance. I just got too many thousands of words in without being near the ending and had to try a different goal.

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The Set Tour, Part 13: Continuity

I hope we’re all comfortable with the idea of looking at sets of functions. If not we can maybe get comfortable soon. What’s important about functions is that we can add them together, and we can multiply them by real numbers. They work in important ways like regular old numbers would. They also work the way vectors do. So all we have to do is be comfortable with vectors. Then we have the background to talk about functions this way. And so, my first example of an oft-used set of functions:

C[a, b]

People like continuity. It’s comfortable. It’s reassuring, even. Most situations, most days, most things are pretty much like they were before, and that’s how we want it. Oh, we cast some hosannas towards the people who disrupt the steady progression of stuff. But we’re lying. Think of the worst days of your life. They were the ones that were very much not like the day before. If the day is discontinuous enough, then afterwards, people ask one another what they were doing when the discontinuous thing happened.

(OK, there are some good days which are very much not like the day before. But imagine someone who seems informed assures you that tomorrow will completely change your world. Do you feel anticipation or dread?)

Mathematical continuity isn’t so fraught with social implications. What we mean by a continuous function is — well, skip the precise definition. Calculus I students see it, stare at it, and run away. It comes back to the mathematics majors in Intro to Real Analysis. Then it comes back again in Real Analysis. Mathematics majors get to accepting it sometime around Real Analysis II, because the alternative is Functional Analysis. The definition’s in truth not so bad. But it’s fussy and if you get any parts wrong silly consequences follow.

If you’re not a mathematics major, or if you’re a mathematics major not taking a test in Real Analysis, you can get away with this. We’re talking here, and we’re going to keep talking, about functions with real numbers as the domain and real numbers as the range. Later, we can go to complex-valued numbers, or even vectors of numbers. The arguments get a bit longer but don’t change much, so if you learn this you’ve got most of the way to learning everything.

A continuous function is one whose graph you can draw without having to lift your pen. We like continuous functions, mathematically, because they are so much easier to work with. Why are they easy? Well, because if you know the value of your function at one point, you know approximately what it is at nearby points. There’s predictability to the function’s values. You can see why this would make it easier to do calculations. But it makes analysis easy too. We want to do a lot of proofs which involve arithmetic with the values functions have. It gets so much easier that we can say the function’s actual value is something like the value it has at some point we happen to know.

So if we want to work with functions, we usually want to work with continuous functions. They behave more predictably, and more like we hope they will.

The set C[a, b] is the set of all continuous real-valued whose domain is the set of real numbers from a to b. For example, pick a function that’s in C[-1, 1]. Let me call it f. Then f is a real-valued function. And its domain is the real numbers from -1 to 1. In the absence of other information about what its range is, we assume it to be the real numbers R. We can have any real numbers as the boundaries; C[-1000, π] is legitimate if eccentric.

There are some ranges that are particularly popular. All the real numbers is one. That might get written C(R) for shorthand. C[0, 1], the range from 0 to 1, is popular and easy to work with. C[-1, 1] is almost as good and has the advantage of giving us negative numbers. C[-π, π] is also liked because it meshes well with the trigonometric functions. You remember those: sines and cosines and tangent functions, plus some unpopular ones we try to not talk about. We don’t often talk about other ranges. We can change, say, C[0, 1] into C[0, 10] exactly the way you’d imagine. Re-scaling numbers, and even shifting them up or down some, requires so little work we don’t bother doing it.

C[-1, 1] is a different set of functions from, say, C[0, 1]. There are many functions in one set that have the same rule as a function in another set. But the functions in C[-1, 1] have a different domain from the functions in C[0, 1]. So they can’t be the same functions. The rule might be meaningful outside the domain. If the rule is “f:x -> 3*x”, well, that makes sense whatever x should be. But a function is the rule, the domain, and the range together. If any of the parts changes, we have a different function.

The way I’ve written the symbols, with straight brackets [a, b], means that both the numbers a and b are in the domain of these functions. If I want to omit the boundaries — have every number greater than a but not a itself, and have every number less than b but not b itself — then we change to parentheses. That would be C(-1, 1). If I want to include one boundary but not the other, use a straight bracket for the boundary to include, and a parenthesis for the boundary to omit. C[-1, 1) says functions in that set have a domain that includes -1 but does not include -1. It also drives my text editor crazy having unmatched parentheses and brackets like that. We must suffer for our mathematical arts.

• howardat58 12:49 am on Monday, 7 March, 2016 Permalink | Reply

And now for a definition of continuity over the rationals. Brouwer must have got somewhere with this!

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• Joseph Nebus 7:51 am on Wednesday, 9 March, 2016 Permalink | Reply

Oh, perhaps. Maybe for the summer glossary.

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A Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Basis

Today’s glossary term is one that turns up in many areas of mathematics. But these all share some connotations. So I mean to start with the easiest one to understand.

Basis.

Suppose you are somewhere. Most of us are. Where is something else?

That isn’t hard to answer if conditions are right. If we’re allowed to point and the something else is in sight, we’re done. It’s when pointing and following the line of sight breaks down that we’re in trouble. We’re also in trouble if we want to say how to get from that something to yet another spot. How can we guide someone from one point to another?

We have a good answer from everyday life. We can impose some order, some direction, on space. We’re familiar with this from the cardinal directions. We say where things on the surface of the Earth are by how far they are north or south, east or west, from something else. The scheme breaks down a bit if we’re at the North or the South pole exactly, but there we can fall back on pointing.

When we start using north and south and east and west as directions we are choosing basis vectors. Vectors are directions in how far to move and in what direction. Suppose we have two vectors that aren’t pointing in the same direction. Then we can describe any two-dimensional movement using them. We can say “go this far in the direction of the first vector and also that far in the direction of the second vector”. With the cardinal directions, we consider north and east, or east and south, or south and west, or west and north to be a pair of vectors going in different directions.

(North and south, in this context, are the same thing. “Go twenty paces north” says the same thing as “go negative twenty paces south”. Most mathematicians don’t pull this sort of stunt when telling you how to get somewhere unless they’re trying to be funny without succeeding.)

A basis vector is just a direction, and distance in that direction, that we’ve decided to be a reference for telling different points in space apart. A basis set, or basis, is the collection of all the basis vectors we need. What do we need? We need enough basis vectors to get to all the points in whatever space we’re working with.

(If you are going to ask about doesn’t “east” point in different directions as we go around the surface of the Earth, you’re doing very well. Please pretend we never move so far from where we start that anyone could notice the difference. If you can’t do that, please pretend the Earth has been smooshed into a huge flat square with north at one end and we’re only just now noticing.)

We are free to choose whatever basis vectors we like. The worst that can happen if we choose a lousy basis is that we have to write out more things than we otherwise would. Our work won’t be less true, it’ll just be more tedious. But there are some properties that often make for a good basis.

One is that the basis should relate to the problem you’re doing. Suppose you were in one of mathematicians’ favorite places, midtown Manhattan. There is a compelling grid here of streets running north-south and avenues running east-west. (Broadway we ignore as an implementation error retained for reasons of backwards compatibility.) Well, we pretend they run north-south and east-west. They’re actually a good bit clockwise of north-south and east-west. They do that to better match the geography of the island. A “north” street runs about parallel to the way Manhattan’s long dimension runs. In the circumstance, it would be daft to describe directions by true north or true east. We would say to go so many streets “north” and so many avenues “east”.

Purely mathematical problems aren’t concerned with streets and avenues. But there will often be preferred directions. Mathematicians often look at the way a process alters shapes or redirects forces. There’ll be some directions where the alterations are biggest. There’ll be some where the alterations are shortest. Those directions are probably good choices for a basis. They stand out as important.

We also tend to like basis vectors that are a unit length. That is, their size is 1 in some convenient unit. That’s for the same reason it’s easier to say how expensive something is if it costs 45 dollars instead of nine five-dollar bills. Or if you’re told it was 180 quarter-dollars. The length of your basis vector is just a scaling factor. But the more factors you have to work with the more likely you are to misunderstand something.

And we tend to like basis vectors that are perpendicular to one another. They don’t have to be. But if they are then it’s easier to divide up our work. We can study each direction separately. Mathematicians tend to like techniques that let us divide problems up into smaller ones that we can study separately.

I’ve described basis sets using vectors. They have intuitive appeal. It’s easy to understand directions of things in space. But the idea carries across into other things. For example, we can build functions out of other functions. So we can choose a set of basis functions. We can multiply them by real numbers (scalars) and add them together. This makes whatever function we’re interested in into a kind of weighted average of basis functions.

Why do that? Well, again, we often study processes that change shapes and directions. If we choose a basis well, though, the process changes the basis vectors in easy to describe ways. And many interesting processes let us describe the changing of an arbitrary function as the weighted sum of the changes in the basis vectors. By solving a couple of simple problems we get the ability to solve every interesting problem.

We can even define something that works like the angle between functions. And something that works a lot like perpendicularity for functions.

And this carries on to other mathematical constructs. We look for ways to impose some order, some direction, on whatever structure we’re looking at. We’re often successful, and can work with unreal things using tools like those that let us find our place in a city.

The Set Tour, Stage 1: Intervals

I keep writing about functions. I’m not exactly sure how. I keep meaning to get to other things but find interesting stuff to say about domains and ranges and the like. These domains and ranges have to be sets. There are some sets that come up all the time in domains and ranges. I thought I’d share some of the common ones. The first family of sets is known as “intervals”.

[ 0, 1 ]

This means all the real numbers from 0 to 1. Written with straight brackets like that means to include the matching point there — that is, 0 is in the domain, and so is 1. We don’t always want to include the ending points in a domain; if we want to omit them, we write parentheses instead. So (0, 1) would mean all the real numbers bigger than zero and smaller than one, but neither zero nor one. We can also include one but not both endpoints: [0, 1) is fine. It offends copy editors, by having its open bracket and its closed parenthesis be unmatched, but its meaning is clear enough. It’s the real numbers from zero to one, with zero allowed but one ruled out. We can include or omit either or both endpoints, and we have to keep that straight. But for most of our work it doesn’t matter what we choose, as long as we stay consistent. It changes proofs a bit, but in routine ways.

Zero to one is a popular interval. Negative 1 to 1 is another popular interval. They’re nice round numbers. And the intervals between -π and π, or between 0 and 2π, are also popular. Those match nicely with trigonometric functions such as sine and tangent. You can make an interval that runs from any number to any other number — [ a, b ] if you don’t want to pin down just what numbers you mean. But [ 0, 1 ] and [ -1, 1 ] are popular choices among mathematicians. If you can prove something interesting about a function with a domain that’s either of these intervals, you can then normally prove it’s true on whatever a function with a domain that’s whatever interval you want. (I can’t think of an exception offhand, but mathematics is vast and my statement sweeping. There may be trouble.)

Suppose we start out with a function named f that has its domain the interval [ -16, 48 ]. I’m not saying anything about its range or its rule because they don’t matter. You can make them anything you like, if you need them to be anything. (This is exactly the way we might, in high school algebra, talk about the number named `x’ without ever caring whether we find out what number that actually is.) But from this start we can talk about a related function named g, which has as its domain [ -1, 1 ]. A rule for g is $g: x \mapsto f\left(32\cdot x + 16\right)$; that is, g(0) is whatever number you get from f(16), for example. So if we can prove something’s true about g on this standard domain, we can almost certainly show the same thing is true about f on the other domain. This is considered a kind of mapping, or as a composition of functions. It’s a composition because you can see it as taking your original number called x, seeing what one function does with it — in this case, multiplying it by 32 and adding 16 — and then seeing what a second function — the one named f — does with that.

It’s easy to go the other way around. If we know what g is on the domain [ -1, 1 ] then we can define a related function f on the domain [ -16, 48 ]. We can say $f: x \mapsto g\left(\frac{1}{32}\cdot\left(x - 16\right)\right)$. And again, if we can show something’s true on this standard domain, we can almost certainly show the same thing’s true on the other domain.

I gave examples, mappings, that are simple. They’re linear. They don’t have to be. We just have to match everything in one interval to everything in another. For example, we can match the domain (1, ∞) — all the numbers bigger than 1 — to the domain (0, 1). Let’s again call f the function with domain (1, ∞). Then we can say g is the function with domain (0, 1) and defined by the rule $g: x \mapsto f\left(\frac{1}{x}\right)$. That’s a nonlinear mapping.

Linear mappings are easier to deal with than nonlinear mappings. Usually, mathematically, if something is divided into “linear” and “nonlinear” the linear version is easier. Sometimes a nonlinear mapping is the best one to use to match a function on some convenient domain to a function on some other one. The hard part is often a matter of showing that something true for one function on a common domain like (0, 1) will also be true for the other domain, (a, b).

However, showing that the truth holds can often be done without knowing much about your specific function. You maybe need to know what kind of function it is, that it’s continuous or bounded or something like that. But the actual specific rule? Not so important. You can prove that the truth holds ahead of time. Or find an analysis textbook or paper or something where someone else has proven that. So while a domain might be any interval, often in practice you don’t need to work with more than a couple nice familiar ones.

One Way We Write Functions

During the Summer A To Z I talked a bit about functions. Mathematically we see these as a collection of three things: a set of things which we call the domain, a set of things which we call the range, and a rule that matches things in the domain to something in the range. The domain and the range can be the same set, or they can be different ones. The definition is quite flexible. What I want to talk about here is how to write them down.

We can describe each of these sets in words, and often will when speaking or when describing a line of argument. But when we want to work, we start using shorthand names, often single letters. For the sets of the domain and range these are usually capital letters. I haven’t noticed much of a preference for which letters to use. D for domain and R for range have a hard-to-resist logic if we don’t really care what the sets are.

There are some sets that are used as domains or ranges a lot, and those have common shorthands. The set of real numbers is often written as R — bold, in print, or written with a double vertical stroke on the R if you’re doing this by hand. The set of whole numbers, integers, gets written as I (for integer) or J (again for integer; the letters I and J weren’t perceived as truly different things until recently) or Z (for Zahlen, German for “counting number”). There are a lot of others and don’t worry about them.

The rules for a function are generally described by a lowercase letter. It’s most commonly f, with g and h pressed into service if f won’t do. Subscrips are common also: f1, f2, fj, fn, and so on. Again, any name is allowed, as long as you’re consistent about it. But f and g and h are used as “names of functions” so often that it’s what the reader will expect they mean even without being told.

One common shorthand for saying that a function named “f” has the domain “D” and the range “R” is to use an arrow. Write out “f: D –> R”. The function name comes first, before the colon; then the domain, and an arrow, and the range. There are other notations but this is the one I see most often. This is often read aloud as “f maps D into R”. The activity of the verb “map” — well, it’s kind of action-y — suggests motion to my mind. Functions are commonly used to describe how a system changes over time. This seems mnemonic to me, as arrows suggest flow and motion. We often use the language of flowing things even for problems that don’t have anything to do with moving objects or any sense of time.

There’s another part of function-defining that has to be done, though. Most often we’re interested in domains and ranges that are both numbers, or at least collections of numbers. And we want to describe matching something in the domain with something in the range based on a formula. If “x” is a number in the domain then, say, “x2 – 4x + 4” is the corresponding number in the range.

One way to write down this rule is the way we get in introductory algebra class, and to write something like “f(x) = x2 – 4x + 4”. The “x” is, here, a dummy variable. We will never care about pinning it down to any particular number. If we write “f(3)” we mean to evaluate whatever’s on the right hand of the equals sign, using 3, the thing in parentheses, wherever “x” appears in the rule definition. In this case that would be the number 32 – 4*3 + 4 which it happens is 1. If we write “f(1 – t)” we would evaluate “(1 – t)2 – 4(1 – t) + 4” which we might want to leave as is, or might want to simplify somehow. It depends what we’re up to.

But we can also use an arrow notation, and write the same rule as “f: x –> x2 – 4x + 4”. My feeling is this notation makes it clearer that the definition isn’t itself something to solve, and that the definition doesn’t care what value x is. It should suggest how we can substitute anything for x and should do so throughout the expression to the right of the arrow.

Wikipedia asserts that when writing the rule this way there should be a vertical stroke on the left side of the arrow. This is probably a good rule, since “f: D –> R” and “f: x –> x2 – 4x + 4” are talking about different things. I’m not sure the rule is consistently followed, though. I suspect that in most contexts it’s clear what is meant.

• howardat58 4:36 pm on Friday, 11 September, 2015 Permalink | Reply

I once objected to someone’s math worksheet which had various graphs displayed, with the question “Which of these graphs is a function?”
Another bugbear is “the function f(x) = 2x + 3”, which means “the function f whose rule is x –> 2x +3”
Also “the function y = 3x + 3”
It is not in the least surprising that kids get confused with this sort of stuff.

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• Joseph Nebus 11:49 pm on Saturday, 12 September, 2015 Permalink | Reply

You’re right. It isn’t surprising people get confused given how loosely the word gets thrown around. I understand why it gets thrown around loosely; people who’ve mastered the subject get good at converting from “y = 2x+3” to “the collection of points whose coordinates make the equation y = 2x + 3 true” to “the collection of points with x-coordinate x and y-coordinate f(x)” and “the function with rule x -> 2x + 3” and “f(x) = 2x + 3”, and then forget that there is a lot of converting between similar but not identical concepts at work there. It’s hard for a fluent speaker to remember where one stumbled on the language.

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• elkement 7:06 am on Tuesday, 6 October, 2015 Permalink | Reply

At first glance I read: “One Way Functions” :-)

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• Joseph Nebus 10:12 pm on Tuesday, 6 October, 2015 Permalink | Reply

Well, they’re neat too. I might get around to that sometime too.

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A Summer 2015 Mathematics A to Z Roundup

Since I’ve run out of letters there’s little dignified to do except end the Summer 2015 Mathematics A to Z. I’m still organizing my thoughts about the experience. I’m quite glad to have done it, though.

For the sake of good organization, here’s the set of pages that this project’s seen created:

c
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k
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r