# All Questions

17k views

### What should be learned in a first serious schemes course?

I've just finished teaching a year-long "foundations of algebraic geometry" class. It was my third time teaching it, and my notes are gradually converging. I've enjoyed it for a number of reasons ...
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### SO$(4)$ (& SO$(n)$) characterization?

I believe it is the case that any finite subgroup of SO$(3)$ (the $3 \times 3$ orthogonal matrices of determinant $1$) is either a cyclic group $C_n$, or a dihedral group $D_n$, or one of the groups ...
265 views

### Dominated convergence to characteristic function

Let $\phi_m(x):=\chi_{[0,1]} * \chi_{[0,1]} *...* \chi_{[0,1]}$ be the m -times convolution (so $m+1$ characteristic functions are involved). Then the Fourier transform of this function is given by ...
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### Is there an arbitrarily long arithmetic progression whose members are palindromes?

I suspect there isn't for some simple reason, but I could not find anything on it and if the opposite would hold in a more general sense, then that would solve this question.
10k views

### What elementary problems can you solve with schemes?

I'm a graduate student who's been learning about schemes this year from the usual sources (e.g. Hartshorne, Eisenbud-Harris, Ravi Vakil's notes). I'm looking for some examples of elementary ...
10k views

### Are there examples of non-orientable manifolds in nature?

Whilst browsing through Marcel Berger's book "A Panoramic View of Riemannian Geometry" and thinking about the Klein bottle, I came across the sentence: "The unorientable surfaces are never discussed ...
7k views

### Sexy vacuity …

I included this footnote in a paper in which I mentioned that the number of partitions of the empty set is 1 (every member of any partition is a non-empty set, and of course every member of the empty ...
9k views

### How has modern algebraic geometry affected other areas of math?

I have a friend who is very biased against algebraic geometry altogether. He says it's because it's about polynomials and he hates polynomials. I try to tell him about modern algebraic geometry, ...
358 views

### Prerequisites for reading Gregory Perelman's work

What are the prerequisites for understanding the work of Perelman concerning the Poincaré conjecture? I am referring to the last three papers here.
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### ODE properties true in finite dimension but not in Banach spaces of infinite dimension

Some properties of Ordinary Differential Equations - ODE are true in finite dimension spaces but not in Banach spaces of infinite dimension. The first one I know is the Peano existence theorem. I ...
10k views

### Are there any very hard unknots?

Some years ago I took a long piece of string, tied it into a loop, and tried to twist it up into a tangle that I would find hard to untangle. No matter what I did, I could never cause the later me any ...
2k 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 ...
911 views

### What do you do if you believe a problem is undecidable?

While the title of this question is subjective, I hope to make what I'm looking for quite concrete. The first, and main question is this: If you believe that a problem you are working on is formally ...
17k views

### What is an integrable system

What is an integrable system, and what is the significance of such systems? (Maybe it is easier to explain what a non-integrable system is.) In particular, is there a dichotomy between "integrable" ...
7k views

### 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 ...
107 views

### Submersion theorem for smooth tame Frechet manifolds

If $M$ and $N$ are Banach manifolds, $f:M\rightarrow N$ is a smooth map, and $q\in N$ is a regular value, so $f$ is a submersion on $f^{-1}(q)$, it is well known that the level set $f^{-1}(q)$ is a ...
157 views

### A “universally non Hypercomplete” $\infty$-topos?

My question is : Is there a classifying $\infty$-topos for $\infty$-connected objects ? Does this $\infty$-topos has a nice description (as an $\infty$-category ) ? What I mean by $\infty$-connected ...
2k views

### Intuition behind the ricci flow

I hope you don't shoot me for this question. I try to understand among other things the Ricci flow. However I have no idea of the intuition behind the definition. So my questions is: What is the ...
5k views

### What would you want on a Lie theory cheat poster?

For some long time now I've thought about making a poster-sized "cheat sheet" with all the data about Lie groups and their representations that I occasionally need to reference. It's a moving target, ...
710 views

### A more natural proof of Dold-Kan?

The Dold-Kan correspondence gives an equivalence of categories between $SAb$, the category of simplicial abelian groups, and $Ch_{\geq 0}$, the category of non-negatively graded chain complexes of ...
1k views

### Is the Manickam-Miklós-Singhi Conjecture solved? [closed]

This arXiv paper is claimed to contain a proof for the MMS conjecture. But it seems that this manuscript is not yet peer reviewed by other mathematicians. I personally tried to follow the paper, but ...
20k views

### What are the big problems in probability theory?

Most branches of mathematics have big, sexy famous open problems. Number theory has the Riemann hypothesis and the Langlands program, among many others. Geometry had the Poincaré conjecture for a long ...
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4k views

### What mathematical treatment is there on the renormalization group flow in a space of Lagrangians?

What mathematical treatment is there on the renormalization group flow in a space of Lagrangians?
### Polynomial bijection from $\mathbb Q\times\mathbb Q$ to $\mathbb Q$?
Is there any polynomial $f(x,y)\in{\mathbb Q}[x,y]{}\$ such that $f:\mathbb{Q}\times\mathbb{Q} \rightarrow\mathbb{Q}$ is a bijection?