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Questions designed to get an overview of a specific subject or body of results or to understand the relations among similar definitions, techniques or concepts appearing in different sub-fields of mathematics. While such questions by their very nature sometimes cannot be made very narrow and focused, it can be helpful to keep in mind that the design of MathOverflow does not make it a good fit for questions that are too broad.

4 votes

What is the high-concept explanation on why real numbers are useful in number theory?

I would like to say that at least to some extent we need the real numbers and not just rational approximations. Suppose we were being completely formal and we asked the question, ``Is there some alge …
21 votes

Thinking and Explaining

I am immediately reminded of the following phenomenon: "Let's consider an elliptic curve $E$ over $\mathbf{Q}_p$." ~Speaker begins to draw a donut at the board~ Clearly this is wrong. The speaker m …