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Results tagged with soft-question
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user 9417
Questions that are about research in mathematics, or about the job of a research mathematician, without being mathematical problems or statements in the strictest sense. Do not use this tag for easy or supposedly easy mathematical questions.
48
votes
Are there examples of non-orientable manifolds in nature?
Some industrial conveyor belts are hooked up like a Möbius strip, so I've heard, in order to wear evenly on "both" sides.
Of course nonorientabilty has got to show up in more fundamental physical wa …
9
votes
Resubmitting a paper
"how much emphasis do people actually put on where a person's papers have been published, as opposed to how many have been published?"
Quite a bit!
On the other hand, if you withdraw and resubmit, i …
8
votes
Textbook recommendations for undergraduate proof-writing class
I have used Velleman's How to Prove It with success.
7
votes
What does the word "symplectic" mean?
There is a brief explanation here. It looks like the term was coined by Weyl, and was a result of modifying the Latin prefix “com-” from “complex” to the equivalent Greek prefix “sym-”. This is a pret …
- 4,898
7
votes
Using slides in math classroom
Full disclosure: I stole the following idea from my wife.
For some courses, like calculus, I will create slides with beamer, leaving blank spots to fill in during class. I then print the slides out …
6
votes
Examples of great mathematical writing
Lou Kauffman's book "On Knots" inspired me to become a topologist. It conveys the feel of the way topologists think with copious hand-drawn pictures. It also gets into deep waters without losing a pla …
4
votes
Favorite popular math book
Title One Two Three . . . Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science
Author George Gamow
Short description While not limited to mathematics, this is a great book which presents some subtle mathemat …
4
votes
Are there any "related rates" calculus problems that don't feel contrived?
The following example is contrived, but I created it with the same frustration at the boring and repetitive nature of most related rates problems. Since I found this MO question by doing a google sear …
3
votes
Never appeared forthcoming papers
"The Aarhus integral of rational homology 3-spheres IV," by Bar-Natan, Garoufalidis, Rozansky and D. Thurston, never appeared. I think developments in the field overtook the need for the paper, which …
3
votes
Mathematicians with both “very abstract” and “very applied” achievements
William Tutte. He is well known for his contributions to graph and matroid theory, including pioneering the enumeration of planar graphs, and introducing the so called Tutte polynomial. He is less wel …
3
votes
Theorems that are 'obvious' but hard to prove
Inspired by ``the trefoil knot is knotted" answer, how about the fact that Reidemeister moves generate isotopy of PL knots? This is pretty obvious but a full proof requires a lot of machinery. Indeed, …
1
vote
Elegant representations of graphs in R^3
An idea that occurred to me, though I don't know how computationally feasible it is, is to insist all edges are of length one [Edit: this can't be done in general.], put a repelling charge on each ver …
- 4,898
1
vote
Which book would you like to see "texified"?
"Rational Homotopy Theory and Differential Forms." by Griffiths and Morgan.
1
vote
A Learning Roadmap request: From high-school to mid-undergraduate studies
I found "On Knots" by Louis Kauffman to be very inspiring when I was in high school. It's not a book to be read linearly, but rather you should hop around from section to section. As your mathematical …
0
votes
0
answers
286
views
Good and/or standard notation for the abelianization of a Lie algebra
I'd like to solicit good notations for the abelianization of a Lie algebra $\mathfrak g$. One could write $\mathfrak g/[\mathfrak g,\mathfrak g]$, or even $H_1(\mathfrak g)$ but I'd like something tha …
- 4,898