Portal:Mathematics
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Mathematics is the study of representing and reasoning about abstract objects (such as numbers, points, spaces, sets, structures, and games). Mathematics is used throughout the world as an essential tool in many fields, including natural science, engineering, medicine, and the social sciences. Applied mathematics, the branch of mathematics concerned with application of mathematical knowledge to other fields, inspires and makes use of new mathematical discoveries and sometimes leads to the development of entirely new mathematical disciplines, such as statistics and game theory. Mathematicians also engage in pure mathematics, or mathematics for its own sake, without having any application in mind. There is no clear line separating pure and applied mathematics, and practical applications for what began as pure mathematics are often discovered. (Full article...)
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- ... that record-setting airplane spinner Catherine Cavagnaro is also a professional mathematician?
- ... that Donn Piatt threw his mathematics teacher out of the window?
- ... that multiple mathematics competitions have made use of Sophie Germain's identity?
- ... that mathematician Mathias Metternich was one of the founders of the Jacobin club of the Republic of Mainz?
- ... that circle packings in the form of a Doyle spiral were used to model plant growth long before their mathematical investigation by Doyle?
- ... that although the problem of squaring the circle with compass and straightedge goes back to Greek mathematics, it was not proven impossible until 1882?
- ... that more than 60 scientific papers authored by mathematician Paul Erdős were published posthumously?
- ... that mathematics professor Ari Nagel has fathered more than a hundred children?
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- ... that the clique problem of programming a computer to find complete subgraphs in an undirected graph was first studied as a way to find groups of people who all know each other in social networks?
- ... that the Herschel graph is the smallest possible polyhedral graph that does not have a Hamiltonian cycle?
- ... that the Life without Death cellular automaton, a mathematical model of pattern formation, is a variant of Conway's Game of Life in which cells, once brought to life, never die?
- ... that one can list every positive rational number without repetition by breadth-first traversal of the Calkin–Wilf tree?
- ... that the Hadwiger conjecture implies that the external surface of any three-dimensional convex body can be illuminated by only eight light sources, but the best proven bound is that 16 lights are sufficient?
- ... that an equitable coloring of a graph, in which the numbers of vertices of each color are as nearly equal as possible, may require far more colors than a graph coloring without this constraint?
- ... that no matter how biased a coin one uses, flipping a coin to determine whether each edge is present or absent in a countably infinite graph will always produce the same graph, the Rado graph?
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Game theory is a branch of mathematics that is often used in the context of economics. It studies strategic interactions between agents. In strategic games, agents choose strategies which will maximize their return, given the strategies the other agents choose. The essential feature is that it provides a formal modelling approach to social situations in which decision makers interact with other agents. Game theory extends the simpler optimisation approach developed in neoclassical economics.
The field of game theory came into being with the 1944 classic Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. A major center for the development of game theory was RAND Corporation where it helped to define nuclear strategies.
Game theory has played, and continues to play a large role in the social sciences, and is now also used in many diverse academic fields. Beginning in the 1970s, game theory has been applied to animal behaviour, including evolutionary theory. Many games, especially the prisoner's dilemma, are used to illustrate ideas in political science and ethics. Game theory has recently drawn attention from computer scientists because of its use in artificial intelligence and cybernetics. (Full article...)
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