Questions tagged [intuition]
Questions asking for the intuition behind some definition, conjecture, proof etc. In other words, questions designed to improve or to acquire understanding on a conceptual or intuitive level, as opposed to on a technical or formal level. When asking such a question it can be helpful to include a rough description of ones understanding of the subject at hand (on a technical level).
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Densities, pseudoforms, absolute differential forms and measures, differential forms, etc
Apologies if this question is too basic, but I figured I first heard of most of these concepts on MO, so perhaps I can ask here.
Gelfand’s definition, copied from AlvarezPaiva [My edit, could be ...
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Daunting papers/books and how to finally read them
Most people throughout their career encounter at least one paper that seems especially daunting to them.
I'm interested in real stories of how you successfully overcame that to extract the knowledge ...
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How to think about Beilinson's gluing data?
Let $X$ be a complex manifold, $D$ a divisor (that is globally the zero locus of a function) and $U$ its complement. Recall Beilinson's "how to glue perverse sheaves":
Given a perverse ...
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Dévissage for a stratification in Grothendieck's Esquisse d’un programme: What is it?
I have a question about the the intuition of what Grothendieck proposed as tame topology in his "Esquisse d’un programme" as a "better suited" geometric structure in order to have ...
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Justification of modular law in allegories
The modular law in modular lattices can be described as an isomorphism between opposite edges of the square $(a \land b), a, b, (a\lor b)$. A fancier way of saying this is an adjoint equivalence with ...
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What heuristic arguments support Montgomery's conjecture for primes in short intervals?
I have a question regarding a conjecture due to H. L. Montgomery on the number of primes in short intervals. The conjecture apparently arises from probabilistic reasoning upon assuming the Riemann ...
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Meaning of a quantum field given by an operator-valued distribution
I am trying to grasp the basics of rigorous quantum field theory. Let me summise how the setup of non-interacting quantum field theories look like to me.
Let $\mathcal{H}$ be a Hilbert space in which ...
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What is Bernoulli umbra philosophically?
Well, Bernoulli umbra is an umbra whose moments are the Bernoulli numbers.
But what is it philosophically?
For instance, we can consider imaginary unit $i$
an umbra with moments $\{1,0,−1,0,1,\ldots\}$...
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Why does non-decreasing entropy imply actual convergence to that max entropy distribution?
Let $X_n$ be i.i.d with finite variance. Let $\bar X_n=\frac 1n \sum_{i=1}^nX_i$. It is a famous result that the continuous/differential entropy of the normalized average is non-decreasing. $$\mathrm ...
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What's the intuition for weighted limits?
I am reading Fosco's Coend Calculus and Emily Riehl's Categorical Homotopy Theory, Riehl's book motivates it in the following way,
Abstraction 1: Classical limits in terms of cones: Cones from an ...
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How rigorously can we apply the data supplied by this nonstandard attack on Kuratowski's closure-complement problem?
Suppose a student assigned an advanced version of Kuratowski’s closure-complement problem to solve—one that leaves out the standard hint about the finite upper bound of $14$—decides to look for the ...
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Is there any intuition of why the both, regularized logarithm of zero is $-\gamma$ and the regularized logarithm of Bernoulli umbra is $-\gamma$?
If we take the MacLaurin series for $\ln(x+1)$ and evaluate it at $x=-1$, we will get the Harmonic series with the opposite sign: $-\sum_{k=1}^\infty \frac1x$. Since the regularized sum of the ...
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Flat manifolds are local geometric objects
In an article called synthetic geometry in Riemannian manifolds M. Gromov says that
tori (and in general flat manifolds) must be seen as local geometric objects.
He does so after making an example ...
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Intuitively, what makes Bernoulli umbra so similar to the zero divisors in split-complex numbers?
Notation. Here I will denote Bernoulli umbra (its moments are Bernoulli numbers $B_n$) as $B_-$, $B_-+1$ as $B_+$ (an umbra with moments being Bernoulli numbers except $B_1=1/2$).
I will denote the ...
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Do the equalities $\int_0^∞1dx·\int _0^∞1dx=2\int_0^∞xdx$ and $\int_0^∞e^xdx·\int_0^∞e^xdx=2\int_0^∞e^{2 x}dx-2\int_0^∞e^xdx$ make sense?
Previously I tried to define multiplication of divergent integrals, but my approach turned out to be umbral-like.
Now, I decided to define multiplication of divergent integrals in a Hardy fields-like ...
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Intuition/meaning behind/physical content of the concept of a smooth structure
Some mathematical structures are visualized very well. I imagine how a shapeless bunch of points (a set; the only property of which is quantity) is collected in one or another soft form (topological ...
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What do higher order diffusion terms do?
I have been trying to learn to work with the Python module FiPy, which is supposed to solve PDEs of the form
$$
\frac {\partial(\rho \phi)} {\partial t} - [\nabla\cdot(\Gamma_i\nabla)]^n\phi - \nabla \...
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Is orientability a miracle?
$\DeclareMathOperator\SO{SO}\DeclareMathOperator\O{O}$This question is prompted by a recent highly-upvoted question, Conceptual reason why the sign of a permutation is well-defined? The responses made ...
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Conceptual reason why the sign of a permutation is well-defined?
Teaching group theory this semester, I found myself laboring through a proof that the sign of a permutation is a well-defined homomorphism $\operatorname{sgn} : \Sigma_n \to \Sigma_2$. An insightful ...
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Archiving mathematical correspondence
What are great examples of comprehensively archived mathematical correspondence (including both handwritten and electronic items)?
Context: polished papers usually don't reveal the full process that ...
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What is some algebraic intuition behind the fact that the (real part) of the logarithm of Bernoulli umbra plus $1$, is $-\gamma$?
Bernoulli umbra is defined in classical umbral calculus as in Taylor - Difference equations via the classical umbral calculus.
Yu - Bernoulli Operator and Riemann's Zeta Function shows that $\...
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In what precise sense is quantum (i.e., non-commutative) probability not expressable in terms of classical probability?
The quantum set-up has many settings, so let's fix some definitions. I will be taking the Hilbert space approach with a minor modification that I will make explicit.
We begin with a Hilbert space $\...
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Arzelà-Ascoli for $C_b(0,1)$? Or more generally, why is that continuous functions "live most naturally" on compact spaces?
I’m wondering if there is a version of Arzelà-Ascoli for continuous functions on not-necessarily compact metric/Hausdorff spaces $X$, i.e. a characterization of the compact subsets of $C_b(X)$ (under ...
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Intuition of the "work" done by random variables in Monte Carlo methods (incl. MCL)
(I've tried Math SE, but have so far come up empty handed, so I'm trying my luck here.)
I would like to get a better intuitive understanding of why Monte Carlo works so well in approximating a ...
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Can we say that everywhere where it makes sense $\log_0 x=0^x$? Are they equal, the function is self-inverse? If so, what is deep intuition behind it? [closed]
It makes little reason to speak about $0^x$ and $\log_0 x$ on the set of real numbers, but in matrices, it seems, the expressions coincide, for instance,
$0^ \left(
\begin{array}{cc}
\frac{1}{2} &...
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Geometric meaning of localization at $(1+I)$?
Let $I\vartriangleleft A$ be an ideal of a commutative ring. Consider the submonoid $1+I\subset A$. What is the geometric interpretation of localization at this submonoid? How does it relate to the ...
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In what circumstances do we typically encounter expressions like $(c/2+1/2)^n \pm(c/2-1/2)^n$?
It attracted my attention that in many areas of mathematics we sometimes encounter expressions of the form $(c/2+1/2)^n \pm(c/2-1/2)^n$, where $c$ is some kind of a known constant.
Split-complex ...
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Hypermodulus and what mathematical objects have it
When researching divergent integrals, I decided to introduce a concept of "modulus" or "determinant" of divergent integral (and series). Basically, it is the exponent of the real ...
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Why the sign in the definition of the discriminant?
Consider the split monic $f=\prod_{i=1}^n(x-x_i)\in \mathbb Z[x_1 ,\dots ,x_n,x]$. Its discriminant is usually defined as $$(-1)^{n(n-1)/2}\prod_{i=1}^nf^\prime(x_i)=\prod_{1\leq i<j\leq n}(x_i-x_j)...
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Meaning of the coadjoint representation and its orbits
Given a Lie group $G$ there is a natural representation of $G$ on the dual of its Lie algebra $\mathfrak{g}^*$ given by the coadjoint representation. This representation is obtained by differentiating ...
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Topological intuition for the cancellation property of separated maps w.r.t a class of properties of continuous maps
Recall a continuous map is separated if its diagonal is closed. This is equivalent to the fibers being relatively Hausdorff in the total space.
Proposition. Suppose $\mathrm P$ is a class of ...
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What is the intuition behind the Kantorovich potential in optimal transport?
From what I currently understand, under certain conditions one may turn the usual Kantorovich problem - a minimisation problem in terms of measures into a maximisation problem in terms of functions. ...
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Intuition behind formal neighborhood and local ring and formal power series
In The Geometry of Schemes by David Eisenbud and Joe Harris, on page 57, there is an explanation on "node" of a plane curve. The book says that, a curve $X\subseteq \mathbb A_{\mathbb C}^2$ ...
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Intuition behind exceptional inverse image?
The story is probably well-known: given a map $f:X\to Y$ of spaces (say schemes, but there are many other contexts), we have two classical operations between sheaves on $X$ and those on $Y$: the ...
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What is so geometric about symplectic geometry?
Symplectic geometry is often motivated by the Hamilton's equation which in turn are a reformulation of Newton's third law. But the subject itself is of independent mathematical interest. What I don't ...
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What intuitive meaning "determinant" of a divergency (divergent integral, series, germ, pole or a singularity) can have?
I am working on the algebra of "divergencies", that is, infinite integrals, series, and germs.
So, I decided to construct something similar to the modulus or determinant of a matrix of these ...
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Intuition/elegant reason for why Langevin diffusion converges to $\exp(-U)$?
Given a potential function $U: \mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}$, Langevin diffusion is gradient descent plus a Brownian motion term: $X' = -\nabla U(X) + \sqrt{2} \text{ }dW$.
It happens that the ...
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Is the solution to the Fredholm integral equation of the first kind a continuous analogue of Cramer's rule for matrix equations?
When we have a system of of $n$ linear equations represented by $$A \vec{x} = \vec{b} $$ with $\vec{x} = (x_{1}, x_{2}, \dots, x_{n})^{\intercal} $, we can solve for each component of this vector by ...
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Understanding the higher stack of perfect complexes
One of the most famous examples of higher Artin stacks is the stack of perfect complexes. I recall here the basic stuff:
We fix a function $b: \mathbb{Z} \rightarrow
\mathbb{N}$ which is zero ...
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Morphisms between compact quantum groups
Let $(A, \Delta_A)$ and $(B, \Delta_B)$ be two compact quantum groups (in the sense of Woronowicz). I would be tempted to define a morphism $(A, \Delta_A) \to (B, \Delta_B)$ to be a unital $*$-...
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How should you explain parallel transport to undergraduates?
The title is a bit deceiving, because what I really mean is the parallel transport that corresponds to the Levi–Civita connection.
This is in the vein of many other questions on mathoverflow:
What is ...
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Is an interpretation mathematics (fit for publication)?
Background
I am a mathematician with two published papers. The first is based on my PhD thesis and generalised a tool to a more general setting. The thesis was cited a number of times by the time the ...
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What intuitive meaning "determinant" of a divergency (divergent integral or series) can have? [closed]
I am working on the algebra of "divergencies", that is, infinite integrals, series and germs.
So, I decided to construct something similar to determinant of a matrix of these entities.
$$\...
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0
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Can be this "handwaving" idea about "counting" reals somehow put on solid ground?
We know that the Cantor's cardinality of a countable set is $\aleph_0$ and the cardinality of continuum is $2^{\aleph_0}=\aleph_0^{\aleph_0}$. Unfortunately, this measure is based on the idea of ...
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Intuitive explanation why "shadow operator" $\frac D{e^D-1}$ connects logarithms with trigonometric functions?
Consider the operator $\frac D{e^D-1}$ which we will call "shadow":
$$\frac {D}{e^D-1}f(x)=\frac1{2 \pi }\int_{-\infty }^{+\infty } e^{-iwx}\frac{-iw}{e^{-i w}-1}\int_{-\infty }^{+\infty } e^...
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Interpretation of polar derivative and apolar polynomials
If $f(x)$ is a degree $n$ polynomial and $b \in \mathbb{C}$ is a complex number, then the polar derivative of $f$ with respect to $b$ is defined by
$$D_b f(x) = nf(x) - (x - b)f'(x).$$
Two degree $n$ ...
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Examples of back of envelope calculations leading to good intuition?
Some time ago, I read about an "approximate approach" to the Stirling's formula in M.Sanjoy's Street Fighting Mathematics. In summary, the book used a integral estimation heuristic from ...
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What concept does covariance formalise?
So for me the definition the independence of two random variables $X,Y$ is intuitivly very clear.
But what I have never seen motivated is why the heck one would be interested in the covariance $$\...
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What is the Levi-Civita connection trying to describe?
I have seen similar questions, but none of the answers relate to my difficulty, which I will now proceed to convey.
Let $(M,g)$ be a Riemannian manifolds. The Levi-Civita connection is the unique ...
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Dyadic models in number theory and "spillover"
In a classic blog post, Tao discusses the appearance of "dyadic models" in various guises in various areas of math. The number-theoretic version of the idea is to study polynomials over a ...