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Geometry draws its power from the abstract structures that govern the shapes found in the real world. These abstractions often provide deeper insights into the underlying mathematical objects. In this snapshot, we give a glimpse into how certain “curved spaces” called manifolds can be better understood by looking at the (complex) differentiable functions they admit.
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Many sciences and other areas of research and applications from engineering to economics require the approximation of functions that depend on many variables. This can be for a variety of reasons. Sometimes we have a discrete set of data points and we want to find an approximating function that completes this data; another possibility is that precise functions are either not known or it would take too long to compute them explicitly.
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Pattern is ubiquitous and seems totally familiar. Yet if we ask what it is, we find a bewildering collection of answers. Here we suggest that there is a common thread, and it revolves around dynamics.
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In this snapshot, we explain two important mathematical concepts (representation and degeneration) in elementary terms. We will focus on the simplest meaningful examples, and motivate both concepts by study of symmetry.
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The goal of inverse problems is to find an unknown parameter based on noisy data. Such problems appear in a wide range of applications including geophysics, medicine, and chemistry. One method of solving them is known as the Bayesian approach. In this approach, the unknown parameter is modelled as a random variable to reflect its uncertain value. Bayes’ theorem is applied to update our knowledge given new information from noisy data.
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Geophysicists and mathematicians work together to detect geological structures located deep within the earth by measuring and interpreting echoes from manmade earthquakes. This inverse problem naturally involves the mathematics of wave propagation, but we will see that a different mathematical theory – optimal transport – also turns out to be very useful.
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Mathematics is the key to linking scientific knowledge at different scales: from microscopic to macroscopic dynamics. This link gives us understanding on the emergence of observable patterns like flocking of birds, leaf venation, opinion dynamics, and network formation, to name a few. In this article, we explore how mathematics is able to traverse scales, and in particular its application in modelling collective motion of bacteria driven by chemical signalling.
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We consider surfaces of three types: the sphere, the torus, and many-holed tori. These surfaces naturally admit geometries of positive, zero, and negative cur- vature, respectively. It is interesting to study straight line paths, known as geodesics, in these geometries. We discuss the issue of counting closed geodesics; this is particularly rich for hyperbolic (negatively curved) surfaces.
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Die Yang–Baxter-Gleichung ist eine faszinierende Gleichung, die in vielen Gebieten der Physik und der Mathematik auftritt und die am besten diagrammatisch dargestellt wird. Dieser Snapshot schlägt einen weiten Bogen vom Zöpfeflechten über die Yang–Baxter-Gleichung bis hin zur aktuellen Forschung zu Systemen von unendlichdimensionalen Algebren, die wir „Unterfaktoren“ nennen.
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