Timeline for How do you present a non-existence theorem?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
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| Jul 6, 2012 at 18:19 | comment | added | Greg Marks | This story implicitly answers the problem of the student who shrugs upon hearing the theorem on bounded entire functions. By the time it occurs in a class it's very natural, but presented with it cold, the reaction of any student of normal inquisitiveness would be astonishment and an attempt at a counterexample. A student who isn't excited about celebrated classical results is perhaps best advised to find a field of study more to his liking. Incidentally, a result that has allured many a student into mathematics is, so to speak, a non-existence non-theorem: the continuum hypothesis. | |
| Oct 27, 2011 at 23:09 | history | edited | Will Jagy | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 325 characters in body; deleted 3 characters in body
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| Oct 27, 2011 at 22:54 | comment | added | Will Jagy | Cool! Thank you, Henry. I can't say the name Kendig links to this memory for me. But then, the name Manin was of no help when Keith Conrad filled in the details on my part rendition of the Coleman-Manin story. | |
| Oct 27, 2011 at 22:48 | comment | added | Henry Cohn | The preface of Keith Kendig's book Conics tells this story about his interaction with Hassler Whitney (including various details like the 20 minutes, so I bet it is the story you remember). Amusingly, the theorem wasn't one of Kendig's results, but rather Bezout's theorem about the number of intersections of plane curves. | |
| Oct 27, 2011 at 20:41 | history | answered | Will Jagy | CC BY-SA 3.0 |