Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" is a 1960 article written by the physicist Eugene Wigner, published in Communication in Pure and Applied Mathematics. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] In it, Wigner observes that a theoretical physics's mathematical structure often points the way to further advances in that theory and to ...
A Mathematician's Apology 1st edition Author G. H. Hardy Subjects Philosophy of mathematics, mathematical beauty Publisher Cambridge University Press Publication date 1940 OCLC 488849413 A Mathematician's Apology is a 1940 essay by British mathematician G. H. Hardy which defends the pursuit of mathematics for its own sake. Central to Hardy's "apology" – in the sense of a formal justification ...
The mathematician Jerry P. King describes mathematics as an art, stating that "the keys to mathematics are beauty and elegance and not dullness and technicality", and that beauty is the motivating force for mathematical research. [91] King cites the mathematician G. H. Hardy's 1940 essay A Mathematician's Apology.
It is in this essay that the term 'potential function' first occurs. Herein also his remarkable theorem in pure mathematics, since universally known as Green's theorem, and probably the most important instrument of investigation in the whole range of mathematical physics, made its appearance. We are all now able to understand, in a general way ...
Examples of unexpected applications of mathematical theories can be found in many areas of mathematics. A notable example is the prime factorization of natural numbers that was discovered more than 2,000 years before its common use for secure internet communications through the RSA cryptosystem. [127]
In the 18th century, Daniel Bernoulli applied mathematics to describe the effect of smallpox on the human population. Thomas Malthus' 1789 essay on the growth of the human population was based on the concept of exponential growth. Pierre François Verhulst formulated the logistic growth model in 1836. [citation needed]
Differential equations are an important area of mathematical analysis with many applications in science and engineering. Analysis is the branch of mathematics dealing with continuous functions, limits, and related theories, such as differentiation, integration, measure, infinite sequences, series, and analytic functions. [1] [2]
Euler's identity is a special case of Euler's formula, which the physicist Richard Feynman called "our jewel" and "the most remarkable formula in mathematics". [7] Modern examples include the modularity theorem, which establishes an important connection between elliptic curves and modular forms (work on which led to the awarding of the Wolf ...