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1072 votes
296 answers
351k views

Examples of common false beliefs in mathematics

The first thing to say is that this is not the same as the question about interesting mathematical mistakes. I am interested about the type of false beliefs that many intelligent people have while ...
394 votes
115 answers
110k views

Not especially famous, long-open problems which anyone can understand

Question: I'm asking for a big list of not especially famous, long open problems that anyone can understand. Community wiki, so one problem per answer, please. Motivation: I plan to use this list in ...
333 votes
34 answers
96k views

Why is a topology made up of 'open' sets? [closed]

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I don't think I've ever been able to genuinely motivate the definition of a topological space in an undergraduate course. Clearly, the definition distills the essence of ...
195 votes
30 answers
78k views

Real-world applications of mathematics, by arxiv subject area?

What are the most important applications outside of mathematics of each of the major fields of mathematics? For concreteness, let's divide up mathematics according to arxiv mathematics categories, e.g....
43 votes
7 answers
12k views

On starting graduate school and common pitfalls...

Hi, I'll be starting graduate school soon, and when I look back at my college career, there are certain things I wish I could have done differently. In hindsight, I wished I wasn't in such a rush to ...
208 votes
72 answers
51k views

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 ...
263 votes
29 answers
89k views

Mathematical games interesting to both you and a 5+-year-old child

Background: My daughter is 6 years old now, once I wanted to think on some math (about some Young diagrams), but she wanted to play with me... How to make both of us to do what they want ? I guess ...
160 votes
28 answers
30k views

How to present mathematics to non-mathematicians?

(Added an epilogue) I started a job as a TA, and it requires me to take a five sessions workshop about better teaching in which we have to present a 10 minutes lecture (micro-teaching). In the last ...
93 votes
20 answers
10k views

Short papers for undergraduate course on reading scholarly math

(I know this is perhaps only tangentially related to mathematics research, but I'm hoping it is worthy of consideration as a community wiki question.) Today, I was reminded of the existence of this ...
60 votes
1 answer
7k views

Probability that a stick randomly broken in five places can form a tetrahedron

Edit (June 2015): Addressing this problem is a brief project report from the Illinois Geometry Lab (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), dated May 2015, that appears here along with a foot-...
Benjamin Dickman's user avatar
424 votes
93 answers
149k views

Video lectures of mathematics courses available online for free

It can be difficult to learn mathematics on your own from textbooks, and I often wish universities videotaped their mathematics courses and distributed them for free online. Fortunately, some ...
168 votes
37 answers
207k views

Too old for advanced mathematics? [closed]

Kind of an odd question, perhaps, so I apologize in advance if it is inappropriate for this forum. I've never taken a mathematics course since high school, and didn't complete college. However, ...
154 votes
7 answers
85k views

Where to buy premium white chalk in the U.S., like they have at RIMS? [closed]

While not a research-level math question, I'm sure this is a question of interest to many research-level mathematicians, whose expertise I seek. At RIMS (in Kyoto) in 2005, they had the best white ...
150 votes
31 answers
70k views

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 ...
140 votes
7 answers
34k views

Is the boundary $\partial S$ analogous to a derivative?

Without prethought, I mentioned in class once that the reason the symbol $\partial$ is used to represent the boundary operator in topology is that its behavior is akin to a derivative. But after ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
97 votes
17 answers
17k views

What's a nice argument that shows the volume of the unit ball in $\mathbb R^n$ approaches 0?

Before you close for "homework problem", please note the tags. Last week, I gave my calculus 1 class the assignment to calculate the $n$-volume of the $n$-ball. They had finished up talking about ...
86 votes
44 answers
21k views

Demystifying complex numbers

At the end of this month I start teaching complex analysis to 2nd year undergraduates, mostly from engineering but some from science and maths. The main applications for them in future studies are ...
74 votes
9 answers
16k views

What is Lagrange Inversion good for?

I am planning an introductory combinatorics course (mixed grad-undergrad) and am trying to decide whether it is worth budgeting a day for Lagrange inversion. The reason I hesitate is that I know of ...
51 votes
22 answers
19k views

Why linear algebra is fun!(or ?)

Edit: the original poster is Menny, but the question is CW; the first-person pronoun refers to Menny, not to the most recent editor. I'm doing an introductory talk on linear algebra with the ...
41 votes
3 answers
3k views

Can the unsolvability of quintics be seen in the geometry of the icosahedron?

Q1. Is it possible to somehow "see" the unsolvability of quintic polynomials in the $A_5$ symmetries of the icosahedron (or dodecahedron)? Perhaps this is too vague a question. Q2. Are there ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
10 votes
3 answers
1k views

About the classification of commutative and of cocommutative, fin. dim. Hopf algebras

I want to prove that the cocommutative finite dimensional Hopf algebras over an algebraically closed field of characteristic zero are group algebras (for some finite group) and that the commutative f....
Konstantinos Kanakoglou's user avatar
123 votes
25 answers
18k views

"Mathematics talk" for five year olds

I am trying to prepare a "mathematics talk" for five year olds from my daughter's elementary school. I have given many mathematics talks in my life but this one feels very tough to prepare. Could the ...
109 votes
28 answers
41k views

Why should one still teach Riemann integration?

In the introduction to chapter VIII of Dieudonné's Foundations of Modern Analysis (Volume 1 of his 13-volume Treatise on Analysis), he makes the following argument: Finally, the reader will ...
106 votes
83 answers
19k views

Elementary + short + useful

Imagine your-self in front of a class with very good undergraduates who plan to do mathematics (professionally) in the future. You have 30 minutes after that you do not see these students again. You ...
87 votes
33 answers
24k views

Parodies of abstruse mathematical writing

Perhaps under the influence of a recent question on perverse sheaves, in conjunction with the impending $\pi$-day (3/14/15 at 9:26:53), I recalled a long-ago parody of abstruse mathematical language ...
87 votes
2 answers
4k views

History of $\frac d{dt}\tan^{-1}(t)=\frac 1{1+t^2}$

Let $\theta = \tan^{-1}(t)$. Nowadays it is taught: 1º that $$ \frac{d\theta}{dt} = \frac 1{dt\,/\,d\theta} = \frac 1{1+t^2}, \tag1 $$ 2º that, via the fundamental theorem of calculus, this is ...
Francois Ziegler's user avatar
86 votes
16 answers
9k views

Teaching homology via everyday examples

What stories, puzzles, games, paradoxes, toys, etc from everyday life are better understood after learning homology theory? To be more precise, I am teaching a short course on homology, from ...
74 votes
51 answers
28k views

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 ...
63 votes
20 answers
13k views

What should we teach to liberal arts students who will take only one math course?

Even professors in academic departments other than mathematics---never mind other educated people---do not know that such a field as mathematics exists. Once a professor of medicine asked me whether ...
60 votes
8 answers
13k views

Why the Killing form?

I'm teaching a short summer course on algebraic groups and it's time to talk about the Killing form on the Lie algebra. The students are all undergrads of varying levels of inexperience, and I try to ...
Ryan Reich's user avatar
  • 7,273
57 votes
34 answers
13k views

Are there any books that take a 'theorems as problems' approach?

Are there any books that present theorems as problems? To be more specific, a book on elementary group theory might have written: "Theorem: Each group has exactly one identity" and then show a proof ...
57 votes
11 answers
13k views

Interesting results in algebraic geometry accessible to 3rd year undergraduates

On another thread I asked how I could encourage my final year undergraduate colleagues to take an algebraic geometry or complex analysis courses during their graduate studies. Willie Wong proposed me ...
ifk's user avatar
  • 1,042
43 votes
9 answers
29k views

Applications of knot theory

An answer of André Henriques' inspired the following closely related CW question. Parts of the following is extracted from his answer and my comments. I regularly teach a knot theory class. ...
42 votes
11 answers
17k views

Blackboard rendering of math fonts

I learned most of my math font rendering from watching others (for example, I draw ζ terribly). In most cases it is passable, but I'm often uncomfortable using fonts like Fraktur on the board. ...
Tyler Lawson's user avatar
  • 52.7k
37 votes
1 answer
3k views

Community experiences writing Lamport's structured proofs

About two years ago, I came across this paper by Lamport http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/lamport-how-to-write.pdf on writing proofs hierarchically. It changed how I wrote ...
35 votes
2 answers
2k views

Is it consistent with ZF that $V \to V^{\ast \ast}$ is always an isomorphism?

Let $k$ be a field and $V$ a $k$-vector space. Then there is a map $V \to V^{\ast \ast}$, where $V^{\ast}$ is the dual vector space. If we are in ZFC and $\dim V$ is infinite, then this map is not ...
David E Speyer's user avatar
34 votes
18 answers
20k views

Interesting and accessible topics in graph theory

This summer, I will be teaching an introductory course in graph theory to talented high school seniors. The intent of the course is not to establish proficiency in graph theory, per se. Rather, I hope ...
33 votes
20 answers
5k views

Do names given to math concepts have a role in common mistakes by students?

Perhaps this question overlaps with similar ones, ... but I want to focus on a particular possible cause of confusion. I notice that students are often confused by the concepts of "infinite" and "...
32 votes
9 answers
10k views

Recreational mathematics: where to search?

I am not sure I can strictly define recreational mathematics. But we all feel what it is about: puzzles, problems you can ask your mathematical friends, problems that will bother them for a couple of ...
30 votes
15 answers
17k views

Useless math that became useful

I'm writing an article on Lychrel numbers and some people pointed out that this is completely useless. My idea is to amend my article with some theories that seemed useless when they are created but ...
30 votes
6 answers
11k views

Mathematics for machine learning

I would like to know what mathematics topics are the most important to learn before actually studying the theory on neural networks. I ask that because I will start to learn about neural networks and ...
marcosdecarvalho's user avatar
27 votes
5 answers
7k views

References for "modern" proof of Newlander-Nirenberg Theorem

Hi, I'm starting to prepare a graduate topics course on Complex and Kahler manifolds for January 2011. I want to use this course as an excuse to teach the students some geometric analysis. In ...
21 votes
7 answers
3k views

What should be taught in a 1st course on Riemann Surfaces?

I am teaching a topics course on Riemann Surfaces/Algebraic Curves next term. The course is aimed at 1st and 2nd year US graduate students who have have taken basic coursework in algebra and manifold ...
jlk's user avatar
  • 3,284
21 votes
10 answers
6k views

Not especially famous, long-open problems which higher mathematics beginners can understand

This is a pair to Not especially famous, long-open problems which anyone can understand So this time I'm asking for open questions so easy to state for students of subjects such as undergraduate ...
19 votes
14 answers
4k views

Excellent uses of induction and recursion

Can you make an example of a great proof by induction or construction by recursion? Given that you already have your own idea of what "great" means, here it can also be taken to mean that the chosen ...
16 votes
7 answers
2k views

Uppercase Point Labels in High-School Diagrams: from Euclid?

I wonder if the convention of labeling points in geometric diagrams with uppercase symbols ultimately derives from Greek mathematics, which was originally written in "majuscule" (uppercase) Greek ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
12 votes
4 answers
2k views

Seeking a Geometric Proof of a Generalized Alternating Series' Convergence

Let $z \in \mathbb{C} \backslash \lbrace 1 \rbrace$ with $|z| = 1$. We consider the following infinite series, which necessarily converges: $$S(z) := \sum_{n = 1}^{\infty}\frac{z^n}{n}$$ Note that $S(...
Benjamin Dickman's user avatar
5 votes
3 answers
2k views

Continuous change of basis (and on the definition of determinant) [closed]

Let $(u_1, \ldots, u_n)$ and $(v_1, \ldots, v_n)$ be two ordered bases of $\mathbb R^n$. The orientation of the first basis is defined as the sign of the determinant of $[u_1 \cdots u_n]$, and ...
Gabriel Nivasch's user avatar
222 votes
8 answers
35k views

How to memorise (understand) Nakayama's lemma and its corollaries?

Nakayama's lemma is mentioned in the majority of books on algebraic geometry that treat varieties. So I think Ihave read the formulation of this lemma at least 20 times (and read the proof maybe ...
aglearner's user avatar
  • 14.3k
158 votes
8 answers
7k views

Resources for mathematics advising.

This question is possibly ill-advised. (If it is not right for this site I will delete it.) I, suddenly, have students. It is very clear to me that there is nothing in my education that has ...