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Theories of Mathematics by Nicholas Ventura

Math 25

Professor McCourt
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The Chaos Theory is the study of nonlinear dynamics, where seemingly random events

are actually predictable from simple deterministic equations. In a scientific context, the

word chaos has a slightly different meaning than it does in its general use as a state of

confusion, lacking any order. Chaos, with reference to chaos theory, refers to a severe

lack of order in a system that nevertheless obeys particular laws or rules; this

understanding of chaos is synonymous with instability, a condition discovered by the

physicist Henri Poincare in the early 20th century that refers to an inherent lack of

predictability in some physical systems.

The two main components of chaos theory are the ideas that systems - no matter

how complex they may be - rely upon an underlying order, and that very simple or small

systems and events can cause very complex behaviors or events. This latter idea is known

as sensitive dependence on initial conditions , a circumstance discovered by Edward

Lorenz (who is generally credited as the first experimenter in the chaos theory) in the

early 1960s.

Lorenz, a meteorologist, was running computerized equations to model and

predict weather conditions. Having run a particular sequence, he decided to replicate it.

Lorenz reentered the number from his printout, taken half-way through the sequence, and

left it to run. What he found upon his return was, contrary to his expectations, these

results were radically different from his first outcomes. Lorenz had, in fact, entered not

precisely the same number, .506127, but the rounded figure of .506. According to all

scientific expectations at that time, the resulting sequence should have differed only very

slightly from the original trial, because measurement to three decimal places was
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considered to be fairly precise. Because the two figures were considered to be almost the

same, the results should have likewise been similar. repeated experimentation proved

otherwise, Lorenz concluded that the slightest difference in initial conditions - beyond

human ability to measure - made prediction of past or future outcomes impossible, an

idea that violated the basic conventions of physics.

Newtonian laws of physics are completely based on assumption. They assume

that, at least theoretically, precise measurements are possible, and that more precise

measurement of any condition will yield more precise predictions about past or future

conditions. The assumption was that in theory it was possible to make nearly perfect

predictions about the behavior of any physical system if measurements could be made

precise enough, and that the more accurate the initial measurements were, the more

precise would be the resulting predictions.

Poincare discovered that in some astronomical systems , even very tiny errors in initial

measurements would create unpredictability, far out of proportion with what would be

expected mathematically. Two or more identical sets of initial condition measurements

which according to Newtonian physics would yield identical result , most often led to

different outcomes. Poincare proved mathematically that, even if the initial measurements

could be made a million times more precise, that the uncertainty of prediction for

outcomes did not shrink along with the inaccuracy of measurement, but remained huge.

Unless initial measurements could be absolutely defined - an impossibility - predictability

for complex - chaotic - systems performed scarcely better than if the predictions had been

randomly selected from possible outcomes. (http://library.thinkquest.org/3120/)

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The butterfly effect , first described by Lorenz at the December 1972 meeting of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., illustrates

the main idea of chaos theory. In a 1963 Lorenz had quoted an unnamed meteorologist's

assertion that, if chaos theory were true, a single flap of a single seagull's wings would be

enough to change the course of all future weather systems on the earth. By the time of the

1972 meeting, he had examined and refined that idea for his talk, "Predictability: Does

the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?" The example of

such a small system as a butterfly being responsible for creating such a large and distant

system as a tornado in Texas illustrates the impossibility of making predictions for

complex systems; despite the fact that these are determined by underlying conditions,

precisely what those conditions are can never be sufficiently articulated to allow long-

range predictions.

Although chaos is often thought to refer to randomness and lack of order, it is more

accurate to think of it as an apparent randomness that results from complex systems and

interactions among systems. According to James Gleick, author of Chaos : Making a New

Science , chaos theory is "a revolution not of technology, like the laser revolution or the

computer revolution, but a revolution of ideas. This revolution began with a set of ideas

having to do with disorder in nature: from turbulence in fluids, to the erratic flows of

epidemics, to the arrhythmic writhing of a human heart in the moments before death. It

has continued with an even broader set of ideas that might be better classified under the

rubric of complexity." Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a new Science. N.p.: n.p., 2008.

Print
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Sources/Bibliography

1. Ornes, Stephen. "Http://discovermagazine.com/2007/apr/whatever-happened-to-chaos-

theory." N.p., n.d. Web.

2.Ott, Edward. Chaos in Dynamical systems. N.p.: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.

3. Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a new Science. N.p.: n.p., 2008. Print
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Topology is a branch of pure mathematics, related to Geometry. It unfortunately

shares the name of an unrelated topic more commonly known as topography, that is, the

study of the shape and nature of terrain , but for this assignment it is about the shape of

things, and in this way, it is a kind of geometry. The kinds of objects we study, however,

are often fairly removed from our ordinary experience. Some of these things are four-

dimensional, or higher-dimensional, and cannot truly exist in our everyday world. If some

higher-dimensional being in a higher dimensional universe existed, they might be able to

see these and the most difficult questions in this subject might be quite plain and

commonplace to such a person. But in our usual three-dimensional world, we would have

to turn to mathematics to understand these shapes. Topology is the kind of geometry one

would do if one were rather ignorant of the intricacies of the shape. It ignores issues like

size and angle, which usually pervade our ordinary understanding of geometry. For

instance, in high-school geometry, we examine squares, rectangles, parallelograms,

trapezoids, and so on, giving them names and measuring their sides and angles. But in

topology, we neglect the differences that have to do with distance, and so a square and a

rectangle are topologically considered to be the same shape, and we disregard angle, so a

rectangle and a parallelogram are considered to be the same shape. In fact, any

quadrilateral is topologically the same. (Falconer, Kenneth. Fractal Geometry.) Even if

we shrink one of the sides to zero length, so that we have a triangle, we still consider this

the same. Or if we introduce a bend so that we have more sides, this is still topologically

the same. So are all shapes the same? No. If we break open one of the sides and stretch it

into a line segment, this is a different shape. The point is that this shape is connected

differently. Topologically, a line segment and a square are different. These objects are
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examples of curves in the plane. In some sense they are two dimensional since we draw

them on a plane. In another sense, however, they are one dimensional since a creature

living inside them would be only aware of one direction of motion. We might say that

such shapes have extrinsic dimension 2 but intrinsic dimension 1. To draw examples of

shapes that have intrinsic dimension 2, it is best to look in our three-dimensional space.

Imagine a basketball. The surface of the basketball is a shape of intrinsic dimension 2, as

long as we agree that the basketball consists of the rubbery material (which we imagine is

infinitely thin) and not the empty space inside. Topologically, we consider it to be the

same shape even if we sit on it and thereby distort the shape, or partially deflate it so that

it has all sorts of funny wobbles on it. But imagine the surface of an inner tube. This is

topologically different. The notion of shapes like these can be generalized to higher

dimensions, and such a shape is called a manifold. these manifolds are unrelated to the

part you have in your car, and it's not even a very appropriate name. The term "manifold"

is really the concept of surface" but extended so that the dimension could be arbitrarily

high. The dimension we are talking about is often the intrinsic dimension, not the

extrinsic dimension. Thus, a curve is one dimensional and a surface is two dimensional

manifold.

One important question in topology is to classify manifolds. That is, write down a

list of all manifolds, and provide a way of examining any manifold and recognizing

which one on the list it is. Remember that these manifolds would not be drawn on a piece

of paper, since they are quite high-dimensional. Rather they are described in funny ways,

using mathematics. The question of classifying manifolds is an unsolved one. The story is

completely understood in dimensions zero, one, and two. The story is fairly satisfactorily
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understood in dimensions five and higher. But for manifolds of dimension three and four,

we are largely in the dark.

If this seems confusing, it is. After all, in dimensions zero, one, and two, there is

not much that can happen, and besides, we as three-dimensional creatures can visualize

much of it easily. You might think that dimension three would be fine, too, but remember,

the kind of dimension we are discussing is intrinsic dimension. To visualize it we would

have to live in at least four dimensions. It turns out, however, that much of this

visualization is irrelevant in the final analysis anyway, since you still need to

mathematically prove your results, which is more demanding than simply drawing a

picture and staring at it. But at the very least, the manifolds can become more and more

strange as you increase in dimension. So the higher the dimension, the more difficult the

situation might be. (Http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Topology.html.) But as we increase

in dimension past dimension 5, we are suddenly able to understand the situation again.

This is the paradox. The resolution to the paradox is that from dimension 5 and up, there

is more room to do more fancy kinds of manipulation. There's a pretty neat move called

the "Whitney Trick" that allows you to move complicated objects past each other and

separate them out into understandable pieces.

This leaves dimensions 3 and 4. My research is in four-dimensional manifolds.

We actually live in a four-dimensional manifold, if you count time, and if you disregard

string theorists who wonder if we live in dimension 10 or so.

This does not help make this subject more applicable. But it does allow techniques that

physicists have been working on for many years. On the early 1980s Simon Donaldson
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studied objects called "instantons" on four-dimensional manifolds and revolutionized our

understanding of four-dimensional manifolds. Instantons are the sorts of things that

physicists have been talking about since the 1970s in relation to the theory of subatomic

particles and forces that they experience that are normally influential in our lives only to

the extent that they hold the nucleus of the atom together. This, then, is an application of

physics to mathematics, instead of the other way around! Later, in 1994, breakthroughs in

supersymmetry due to Nathan Seiberg and Ed Witten led to more techniques, and my

research investigates what can be done with these new techniques.

What relevance does this have to our world? At this stage, the most important role

this research plays is one of pure understanding. As a part of theoretical mathematics, we

should strive to understand everything there is to understand. The more we understand,

the more we will be able to deal with challenges that face us in the future. If we were to

only focus on those problems which have direct application, we not only risk being able

to address future problems, but we may end up looking at the problems we want to solve

in the wrong way. The course of human history has shown that many great leaps of

understanding come from a source not anticipated, and that basic research often bears

fruit within perhaps a hundred years.

Of course, there is so much to study. Surely by blindly asking all questions we will be

diluting our efforts too much. This is true, but that is not what theoretical mathematics

does. Instead, it tries to examine those things that are "general", whose understanding will

encompass many different areas of understanding at once. If we imagine a pre-

mathematical being dealing with addition for the first time, we might imagine the

creature making the discovery that two apples added to three apples make five apples,
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then having to make the discovery again when dealing with oranges or rocks or tennis

shoes. But when the creature realizes there is a general truth that 2+3=5, the creature has

made the first step in mathematics by generalizing this observation and talking in

"abstract" concepts. This more "abstract" concept is more removed from the world since

one cannot eat or throw or wear the concept "2", but it is at once more far-reaching in

understanding what is true in the world, since it can apply to new objects that were

previously unknown.

This is the aim of theoretical mathematics. Not to simply play games with objects that are

irrelevant and imaginary, but to deepen our understanding of everything we can imagine,

with the idea that this is the starting point in becoming a more enlightened species.

Topology is complex and very confusing, I could never see it having much importance in

anyone’s every day life, however it is very interesting and has been fun to learn about.

Bibliography/Sources
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1. Falconer, Kenneth. Fractal Geometry. N.p.: Wiley, n.d. Print.

2. Hatcher, Allen. Alegebraic Topology. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

3. "Http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Topology.html." N.p., n.d. Web

Number theory is the branch of math concerned with the study of the integers, and

of the objects and structures that naturally arise from their study. It is one of the oldest

parts of mathematics, alongside geometry, and has been studied at least since the ancient
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Mesopotamians and Egyptians. Perhaps because of its purely mathematical nature (at

least until the development of cryptography and cryptanalysis in the twentieth century,

number theory was thought to be devoid of practical applications), number theory has

often been considered as a central and particularly beautiful part of mathematics. Carl

Friedrich Gauss, arguably the greatest number theorist of all time, has called mathematics

the ``Queen of science'' and he referred to Number Theory as the ``Queen of

mathematics''. Number theory has attracted many of the most outstanding mathematicians

in history: Euclid, Diophantus, Fermat, Legendre, Euler, Gauss, Dedekind, Jacobi,

Eisenstein and Hilbert all made immense contribution to its development. Great twentieth

century number theorists include Artin, Hardy, Ramanujan, and André Weil.

Algebraic Number Theory" extends the concept of "number" to mean an element

of some ring, usually the ring of integers in a finite algebraic extension of the rational

number field. These arise naturally even when considering elementary topics (e.g. the

representation of an integer as a sum of two squares is tantamount to its factorization in

the ring Z[i] of Gaussian integers) but are also interesting in their own right. In this

setting, the familiar features of the natural numbers (e.g. unique factorization) need not

hold. The virtue of the machinery introduced -- class groups, discriminants, Galois

theory, field cohomology, class field theory, group representations and L-functions -- is

that it allows a reconstruction of some of that order in these new settings.

A key feature of some problems in number theory is the extent to which the behaviour of

the problem in integers is reflected in its behaviour modulo p for all primes p, and its

behaviour in the real line. The correct construction for the investigation of this
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phenomenon is usually a local ring such as the p-adic integers. These fields provide an

opportunity for unusual forms of analysis (e.g. series converge iff their terms converge to

zero -- the calculus student's dream!) Local analysis usually arises as a part of algebraic

number theory.

"Analytic Number Theory" involves the study of the Riemann zeta function and other

similar functions such as Dirichlet series. The zeta function may be defined on half the

complex plane as the sum 1 + 1/2s + 1/3s + 1/4s + ...; its connection with number theory

results from its factorization as a product Prod(1 - 1/p^s )^(-1), the product taken over all

primes p. Thus for example the distribution of the primes among the integers can be

deduced from a good understanding of the behaviour of zeta(s). The Riemann Hypothesis

states that zeta(s) is never zero except along the line Re(s)=1/2 (or at the negative even

integers). This is arguably the most important open question in mathematics. There are

other related functions, useful either for studying the Riemann zeta function or for

making similar conclusions about other sets; for example, one may use them to prove the

infinitude of primes in candidate linear progressions.

The number theory has been used for a very long time and due to its’ popularity

has been subject to a great deal of revisions, but it continues to adapt and is used in some

form by most people who practice math.

Bibliography/Sources

1.Jones, Gareth A. Elementary Number Theory. N.p.: Springer, n.d. Print.

2. Rosen, Kenneth. Number Theory and Cryptology. N.p.: Chapman and Hall, n.d. Print.
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