13k views

### Most harmful heuristic?

What's the most harmful heuristic (towards proper mathematics education), you've seen taught/accidentally taught/were taught? When did handwaving inhibit proper learning?
37k views

### Why do we teach calculus students the derivative as a limit?

I'm not teaching calculus right now, but I talk to someone who does, and the question that came up is why emphasize the $h \to 0$ definition of a derivative to calculus students? Something a teacher ...
4k views

### When does Cantor-Bernstein hold?

The Cantor-Bernstein theorem in the category of sets (A injects in B, B injects in A => A, B equivalent) holds in other categories such as vector spaces, compact metric spaces, Noetherian topological ...
13k views

### Is the analysis as taught in universities in fact the analysis of definable numbers?

Ten years ago when I studied in the university I had no idea about definable numbers, but I came to this concept myself. My thoughts were as follows: All numbers are divided into two classes: those ...
7k views

### Why are powers of $\exp(\pi\sqrt{163})$ almost integers?

I've been prodded to ask a question expanding this one on Ramanujan's constant $R=\exp(\pi\sqrt{163})$. Recall that $R$ is very close to an integer; specifically $R=262537412640768744 - \epsilon$ ...
4k views

### Cohomology and fundamental classes

Let X be a real orientable compact differentiable manifold. Is the (co)homology of X generated by the fundamental classes of oriented subvarieties? And if not, what is known about the subgroup ...
3k views

### Is there a version of inclusion/exclusion for vector spaces?

I am asking for a way to compute the rank of the `join' of a bunch of subspaces whose pairwise intersections might be non-zero. So in the case n=2 this is just dim(A_1+A_2)= dim(A_1) +dim(A_2) - ...
5k views

### When is $L^2(X)$ separable?

I have never studied any measure theory, so apologise in advance, if my question is easy: Let $X$ be a measure space. How can I decide whether $L^2(X)$ is separable? In reality, I am interested in ...
1k views

### Extensional theorems mostly used intensionally

Some theorems are stated and proved extensionally, but in practice are almost always used intensionally. Let me give an example to make this clear -- integration by parts:  \int_a^b f(x)g'(x)ds = ...
2k views

### Projection of Borel set from $R^2$ to $R^1$

Hello This should be easy to prove but i have no idea how to do it: If $X \subseteq \mathbb{R}^2$ is borel then $f(X)$ is borel where $f(x,y) = x$ Thanks Tobias
3k views

### Cocomplete but not complete abelian category

This is a duplicate of the following question to which I did not receive any answer: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/238247/complete-but-not-cocomplete-category Let $\mathfrak C$ be an ...
3k views

### Is “compact implies sequentially compact” consistent with ZF?

Over at the nForum, we've been discussing sequential compactness. The discussion led me to realise that I naively assumed that nets were simply Big Sequences, and that I could make a reasonable guess ...
1k views

### When is sin(r \pi) expressible in radicals for r rational?

Perhaps this question will not be considered appropriate for MO - so be it. But hear me out before you dismiss it as completely elementary. As the question suggests, I would like to know when ...
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_hierarchy "If the axiom of constructibility holds then there is a subset of the product of the Baire space with itself which is $\Delta^1_2$ and is the ...