Questions tagged [examples]
For questions requesting examples of a certain structure or phenomenon
554 questions
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Proofs without words
Can you give examples of proofs without words? In particular, can you give examples of proofs without words for non-trivial results?
(One could ask if this is of interest to mathematicians, and I ...
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What are some reasonable-sounding statements that are independent of ZFC?
Every now and then, somebody will tell me about a question. When I start thinking about it, they say, "actually, it's undecidable in ZFC."
For example, suppose $A$ is an abelian group such ...
283
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69
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Awfully sophisticated proof for simple facts
It is sometimes the case that one can produce proofs of simple facts that are of disproportionate sophistication which, however, do not involve any circularity. For example, (I think) I gave an ...
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Fundamental Examples
It is not unusual that a single example or a very few shape an entire mathematical discipline. Can you give examples for such examples? (One example, or few, per post, please)
I'd love to learn about ...
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What are your favorite instructional counterexamples?
Related: question #879, Most interesting mathematics mistake. But the intent of this question is more pedagogical.
In many branches of mathematics, it seems to me that a good counterexample can be ...
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Best online mathematics videos?
I know of two good mathematics videos available online, namely:
Sphere inside out (part I and part II)
Moebius transformation revealed
Do you know of any other good math videos? Share.
156
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52
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Experimental mathematics leading to major advances
I would like to ask about examples where experimentation by computers has led to major mathematical advances.
A new look
Now as the question is five years old and there are certainly more examples of ...
150
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31
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What are the most misleading alternate definitions in taught mathematics?
I suppose this question can be interpreted in two ways. It is often the case that two or more equivalent (but not necessarily semantically equivalent) definitions of the same idea/object are used in ...
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Jokes in the sense of Littlewood: examples? [closed]
First, let me make it clear that I do not mean jokes of the
"abelian grape" variety. I take my cue from the following
passage in A Mathematician's Miscellany by J.E. Littlewood
(Methuen 1953, p. 79):
...
135
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43
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What are the most attractive Turing undecidable problems in mathematics?
What are the most attractive Turing undecidable problems in mathematics?
There are thousands of examples, so please post here only the most attractive, best examples. Some examples already appear on ...
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answers
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What notions are used but not clearly defined in modern mathematics?
"Everyone knows what a curve is, until he has studied enough mathematics to become confused through the countless number of possible exceptions."
Felix Klein
What notions are used but not ...
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Counterexamples in algebraic topology?
In this thread
Books you would like to read (if somebody would just write them...),
I expressed my desire for a book with the title "(Counter)examples in Algebraic Topology".
My reason for doing so ...
102
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17
answers
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Theorems that are essentially impossible to guess by empirical observation
There are many mathematical statements that, despite being supported by a massive amount of data, are currently unproven. A well-known example is the Goldbach conjecture, which has been shown to hold ...
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Examples of theorems with proofs that have dramatically improved over time
I am looking for examples of theorems that may have originally had a clunky, or rather technical, or in some way non-illuminating proof, but that eventually came to have a proof that people consider ...
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8
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Mistakes in mathematics, false illusions about conjectures
Since long time ago I have been thinking in two problems that I have not been able to solve. It seems that one of them was recently solved. I have been thinking a lot about the motivation and its ...
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$A$ is isomorphic to $A \oplus \mathbb{Z}^2$, but not to $A \oplus \mathbb{Z}$
Are there abelian groups $A$ with $A \cong A \oplus \mathbb{Z}^2$ and $A \not\cong A \oplus \mathbb{Z}$?
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What are the most elegant proofs that you have learned from MO?
One of the things that MO does best is provide clear, concise
answers to specific mathematical questions. I have picked up ideas
from areas of mathematics I normally wouldn't touch, simply because
...
85
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34
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books well-motivated with explicit examples
It is ultimately a matter of personal taste, but I prefer to see a long explicit example, before jumping into the usual definition-theorem path (hopefully I am not the only one here). My problem is ...
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Applications of the Chinese remainder theorem
As the title suggests I am interested in CRT applications. Wikipedia article on CRT lists some of the well known applications (e.g. used in the RSA algorithm, used to construct an elegant Gödel ...
84
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What are examples of (collections of) papers which "close" a field?
There is sometimes talk of fields of mathematics being "closed", "ended", or "completed" by a paper or collection of papers. It seems as though this could happen in two ways:
A total characterisation,...
82
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17
answers
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Examples of algorithms requiring deep mathematics to prove correctness
I am looking for examples of algorithms for which the proof of correctness requires deep mathematics ( far beyond what is covered in a normal computer science course).
I hope this is not too broad.
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How would you have answered Richard Feynman's challenge?
Reading the autobiography of Richard Feynman, I struck upon the following paragraphs, in which Feynman recall when, as a student of the Princeton physics department, he used to challenge the students ...
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Algebraic geometry examples
What are some surprising or memorable examples in algebraic geometry, suitable for a course I'll be teaching on chapters 1-2 of Hartshorne (varieties, introductory schemes)?
I'd prefer examples that ...
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34
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Dimension leaps
Many mathematical areas have a notion of "dimension", either rigorously or naively, and different dimensions can exhibit wildly different behaviour. Often, the behaviour is similar for "nearby" ...
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An example of a beautiful proof that would be accessible at the high school level?
The background of my question comes from an observation that what we teach in schools does not always reflect what we practice. Beauty is part of what drives mathematicians, but we rarely talk about ...
74
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$R$ is isomorphic to $R[X,Y]$, but not to $R[X]$
Is there a commutative ring $R$ with $R \cong R[X,Y]$ and $R \not\cong R[X]$?
This is a ring-theoretic analog of my previous question about abelian groups: In fact, in any algebraic category we may ...
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73
votes
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What are some examples of ingenious, unexpected constructions?
Many famous problems in mathematics can be phrased as the quest for a specific construction. Often such constructions were sought after for centuries or even millennia and later proved impossible by ...
73
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Riemannian surfaces with an explicit distance function?
I'm looking for explicit examples of Riemannian surfaces (two-dimensional Riemannian manifolds $(M,g)$) for which the distance function d(x,y) can be given explicitly in terms of local coordinates of ...
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The use of computers leading to major mathematical advances II
I would like to ask about recent examples, mainly after 2015, where experimentation by computers or other use of computers has led to major mathematical advances.
This is a continuation of a question ...
71
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2
answers
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Galoisian sets of prime numbers
The question is about characterising the sets $S(K)$ of primes which split completely in a given galoisian extension $K|\mathbb{Q}$. Do recent results such as Serre's modularity conjecture (as proved ...
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Examples where it's useful to know that a mathematical object belongs to some family of objects
For an expository piece I'm writing, it would be useful to have good examples of the following phenomenon:
(1) ${\cal X}$ is a parameterized family of somethings. (Varieties, schemes, manifolds, ...
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Examples of seemingly elementary problems that are hard to solve?
I'm looking for a list of problems such that
a) any undergraduate student who took multivariable calculus and linear algebra can understand the statements, (Edit: the definition of understanding here ...
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Non-homeomorphic spaces that have continuous bijections between them
What are nice examples of topological spaces $X$ and $Y$ such that $X$ and $Y$ are not homeomorphic but there do exist continuous bijections $f: X \to Y$ and $g: Y \to X$?
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What's a groupoid? What's a good example of a groupoid? [closed]
Or more specifically, why do people get so excited about them? And what's your favorite easy example of one, which illustrates why I should care (and is not a group)?
63
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Theorems demoted back to conjectures
Many mathematicians know the Four Color Theorem and its history: there were two alleged proofs in 1879 and 1880 both of which stood unchallenged for 11 years before flaws were discovered.
I am ...
62
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Simplest examples of nonisomorphic complex algebraic varieties with isomorphic analytifications
If they are not proper, two complex algebraic varieties can be nonisomorphic yet have isomorphic analytifications. I've heard informal examples (often involving moduli spaces), but am not sure of the ...
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Is there a measure zero set which isn't meagre?
A subset of ℝ is meagre if it is a countable union of nowhere dense subsets (a set is nowhere dense if every open interval contains an open subinterval that misses the set).
Any countable set ...
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Examples of using physical intuition to solve math problems
For the purposes of this question let a "physical intuition" be an intuition
that is derived from your everyday experience of physical reality. Your
intuitions about how the spin of a ball affects ...
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Nontrivial question about Fibonacci numbers?
I'm looking for a nontrivial, but not super difficult question concerning Fibonacci numbers. It should be at a level suitable for an undergraduate course.
Here is a (not so good) example of the sort ...
56
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Wonderful applications of the Vandermonde determinant
This semester I am assisting my mentor teaching a first-year undergraduate course on linear algebra in Peking University, China. And now we have come to the famous Vandermonde determinant, which has ...
56
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Does any method of summing divergent series work on the harmonic series?
It's sort of folklore (as exemplified by this old post at The Everything Seminar) that none of the common techniques for summing divergent series work to give a meaningful value to the harmonic series,...
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What are examples of good toy models in mathematics?
This post is community wiki.
A comment on another question reminded me of this old post of Terence Tao's about toy models. I really like the idea of using toy models of a difficult object to ...
53
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Request for examples: verifying vs understanding proofs
My colleague and I are researchers in philosophy of mathematical practice and are working on developing an account of mathematical understanding. We have often seen it remarked that there is an ...
52
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15
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Explicit computations using the Haar measure
This question is somewhat related to my previous one on Grassmanians. The few times I've encountered the Haar measure in the course of my mathematical education, it's always been used in a very ...
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Taking a theorem as a definition and proving the original definition as a theorem
Gian-Carlo Rota's famous 1991 essay, "The pernicious influence of mathematics upon philosophy" contains the following passage:
Perform the following thought experiment. Suppose that you are ...
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Combinatorial results without known combinatorial proofs
Stanley likes to keep a list of combinatorial results for which there is no known combinatorial proof. For example, until recently I believe the explicit enumeration of the de Brujin sequences fell ...
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Difficult examples for Frankl's union-closed conjecture
Frankl's well-known union-closed conjecture states that if F is a finite family of sets that is closed under taking unions (that is, if A and B belong to the family then so does $A\cup B$), then there ...
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are there natural examples of classical mechanics that happens on a symplectic manifold that isn't a cotangent bundle?
I'm curious about just how far the abstraction to a symplectic formalism can be justified by appeal to actual physical examples. There's good motivation, for example, for working over an arbitrary ...
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What is Yoneda's Lemma a generalization of?
What is Yoneda's Lemma a generalization of?
I am looking for examples that were known before category theory entered the stage resp. can be known by students before they start with category theory.
...
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Algebraically closed fields of positive characteristic
I'm taking introductory algebraic geometry this term, so a lot of the theorems we see in class start with "Let k be an algebraically closed field." One of the things that's annoyed me is that as far ...
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