I am now supposed to organize a tiny lecture course on algebraic geometry for undergraduate students who have interest in this subject. I wonder whether there are some basic alge …

I am interested in magic tricks whose explanation requires deep mathematics. The trick should be one that would actually appeal to a layman. An example is the following: the magici …

Hi, this is my first question. It appeared while solving a research problem in cryptography. I am computer science student, so I apologize for lack of mathematical rigor in this qu …

How can one construct families of cocompact discrete subgroups of the topological group $\text{SL}_2(\mathbb{C})$? Here quaternion algebra's might help, I believe, but I have som …

I've been reading about how hamming codes are used to 'solve' the Hat Problem, and I understand how it 'assigns' one person to be the speaker, and how that speaker knows the answer …

In 2 hours after posting this, I realized that preserving Liouville measure solves the problem completely. Sorry for disturbing... Construction of perpetuum mobile: Consider roo …

What can mathematicians can do to help the people of Haiti other than giving money to a charity like Doctors Without Borders? (It is not a bad idea, but, anyone can do that.) Is th …

Can someone explain briefly what a stochastic model is and when it is used I work in finance and have come across this term before but still dont get it :-( EDIT: Is Monte Carol …

Many "tricks" that we use to solve mathematical problems don't correspond nicely to theorems or lemmas, or anything close to that rigorous. Instead they take the form of analogies, …

n(k) = n(k-1) * ((k-1)/(k+2)) This is not my homework problem. I got it from a research paper. I have the solution. I need help deriving it. n(0) is not defined n(1) = 2/3

Have you heard Hilbert's voice ? http://www.angelfire.com/journal/mathematics/HilbertRadio.mp3 Merry Christmas, MO ! [Just copy the above link into a separate window.]

So the cost of a product is determined by the number of items sold. So to figure out the cost of the product now, it is: products_sold * .05 So if you have sold 100 products, th …

Let me explain: a friend of a friend is opening a new pizza restaurant called "Pi", and he's looking to decorate his walls with pi-related material: formulas, equations, theorems w …

I read the following fact: if $U$ is an open subset of $P_k^1$ and $f: U \to U$ is an automorphism of schemes, then $f$ extends to an automorphism of $P_k^1$. Thus I was curious: …

I'm not a mathematician (merely an interested mortal), so bear with me here. I recently read a little on Bill Gosper, the famous hacker/mathematician that worked with Donald Knuth …