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Hilbert's Twenty-third Problem
Hilbert's twenty-third problem is the last of Hilbert problems set out in a celebrated list compiled in 1900 by David Hilbert. In contrast with Hilbert's other 22 problems, his 23rd is not so much a specific "problem" as an encouragement towards further development of the calculus of variations. His statement of the problem is a summary of the state-of-the-art (in 1900) of the theory of calculus of variations, with some introductory comments decrying the lack of work that had been done of the theory in the mid to late 19th century. Original statement The problem statement begins with the following paragraph: So far, I have generally mentioned problems as definite and special as possible.... Nevertheless, I should like to close with a general problem, namely with the indication of a branch of mathematics repeatedly mentioned in this lecture-which, in spite of the considerable advancement lately given it by Weierstrass, does not receive the general appreciation which, in my opinion ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hilbert Problems
Hilbert's problems are 23 problems in mathematics published by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900. They were all unsolved at the time, and several proved to be very influential for 20th-century mathematics. Hilbert presented ten of the problems (1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 13, 16, 19, 21, and 22) at the Paris conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians, speaking on August 8 at the Sorbonne. The complete list of 23 problems was published later, in English translation in 1902 by Mary Frances Winston Newson in the ''Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society''. Earlier publications (in the original German) appeared in and Nature and influence of the problems Hilbert's problems ranged greatly in topic and precision. Some of them, like the 3rd problem, which was the first to be solved, or the 8th problem (the Riemann hypothesis), which still remains unresolved, were presented precisely enough to enable a clear affirmative or negative answer. For other probl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emmy Noether
Amalie Emmy Noether Emmy is the ''Rufname'', the second of two official given names, intended for daily use. Cf. for example the résumé submitted by Noether to Erlangen University in 1907 (Erlangen University archive, ''Promotionsakt Emmy Noether'' (1907/08, NR. 2988); reproduced in: ''Emmy Noether, Gesammelte Abhandlungen – Collected Papers,'' ed. N. Jacobson 1983; online facsimile aphysikerinnen.de/noetherlebenslauf.html). Sometimes ''Emmy'' is mistakenly reported as a short form for ''Amalie'', or misreported as "Emily". e.g. (, ; ; 23 March 1882 – 14 April 1935) was a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. She discovered Noether's First and Second Theorem, which are fundamental in mathematical physics. She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proceedings Of Symposia In Pure Mathematics
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, advocacy and other programs. The society is one of the four parts of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics and a member of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. History The AMS was founded in 1888 as the New York Mathematical Society, the brainchild of Thomas Fiske, who was impressed by the London Mathematical Society on a visit to England. John Howard Van Amringe was the first president and Fiske became secretary. The society soon decided to publish a journal, but ran into some resistance, due to concerns about competing with the American Journal of Mathematics. The result was the ''Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society'', with Fiske as editor-in-chief. The de facto journal, as intended, was influential in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Bellman
Richard Ernest Bellman (August 26, 1920 – March 19, 1984) was an American applied mathematician, who introduced dynamic programming in 1953, and made important contributions in other fields of mathematics, such as biomathematics. He founded the leading biomathematical journal Mathematical Biosciences. Biography Bellman was born in 1920 in New York City to non-practising Jewish parents of Polish and Russian descent, Pearl (née Saffian) and John James Bellman, who ran a small grocery store on Bergen Street near Prospect Park, Brooklyn. On his religious views, he was an atheist. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School, Brooklyn in 1937,Salvador SanabriaRichard Bellman profile at http://www-math.cudenver.edu retrieved October 3, 2008. and studied mathematics at Brooklyn College where he earned a BA in 1941. He later earned an MA from the University of Wisconsin. During World War II he worked for a Theoretical Physics Division group in Los Alamos. In 1946 he received his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dynamic Programming
Dynamic programming is both a mathematical optimization method and a computer programming method. The method was developed by Richard Bellman in the 1950s and has found applications in numerous fields, from aerospace engineering to economics. In both contexts it refers to simplifying a complicated problem by breaking it down into simpler sub-problems in a recursive manner. While some decision problems cannot be taken apart this way, decisions that span several points in time do often break apart recursively. Likewise, in computer science, if a problem can be solved optimally by breaking it into sub-problems and then recursively finding the optimal solutions to the sub-problems, then it is said to have '' optimal substructure''. If sub-problems can be nested recursively inside larger problems, so that dynamic programming methods are applicable, then there is a relation between the value of the larger problem and the values of the sub-problems.Cormen, T. H.; Leiserson, C. E.; Riv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Optimal Control Theory
Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfields: discrete optimization and continuous optimization. Optimization problems of sorts arise in all quantitative disciplines from computer science and engineering to operations research and economics, and the development of solution methods has been of interest in mathematics for centuries. In the more general approach, an optimization problem consists of maximizing or minimizing a real function by systematically choosing input values from within an allowed set and computing the value of the function. The generalization of optimization theory and techniques to other formulations constitutes a large area of applied mathematics. More generally, optimization includes finding "best available" values of some objective function given a def ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lev Pontryagin
Lev Semenovich Pontryagin (russian: Лев Семёнович Понтрягин, also written Pontriagin or Pontrjagin) (3 September 1908 – 3 May 1988) was a Soviet mathematician. He was born in Moscow and lost his eyesight completely due to an unsuccessful eye surgery after a primus stove explosion when he was 14. Despite his blindness he was able to become one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, partially with the help of his mother Tatyana Andreevna who read mathematical books and papers (notably those of Heinz Hopf, J. H. C. Whitehead, and Hassler Whitney) to him. He made major discoveries in a number of fields of mathematics, including optimal control, algebraic topology and differential topology. Work Pontryagin worked on duality theory for homology while still a student. He went on to lay foundations for the abstract theory of the Fourier transform, now called Pontryagin duality. With René Thom, he is regarded as one of the co-founders of cobo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morse Theory
In mathematics, specifically in differential topology, Morse theory enables one to analyze the topology of a manifold by studying differentiable functions on that manifold. According to the basic insights of Marston Morse, a typical differentiable function on a manifold will reflect the topology quite directly. Morse theory allows one to find CW structures and handle decompositions on manifolds and to obtain substantial information about their homology. Before Morse, Arthur Cayley and James Clerk Maxwell had developed some of the ideas of Morse theory in the context of topography. Morse originally applied his theory to geodesics ( critical points of the energy functional on the space of paths). These techniques were used in Raoul Bott's proof of his periodicity theorem. The analogue of Morse theory for complex manifolds is Picard–Lefschetz theory. Basic concepts To illustrate, consider a mountainous landscape surface M (more generally, a manifold). If f is the f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marston Morse
Harold Calvin Marston Morse (March 24, 1892 – June 22, 1977) was an American mathematician best known for his work on the ''calculus of variations in the large'', a subject where he introduced the technique of differential topology now known as Morse theory. The Morse–Palais lemma, one of the key results in Morse theory, is named after him, as is the Thue–Morse sequence, an infinite binary sequence with many applications. In 1933 he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work in mathematical analysis. Biography He was born in Waterville, Maine to Ella Phoebe Marston and Howard Calvin Morse in 1892. He received his bachelor's degree from Colby College (also in Waterville) in 1914. At Harvard University, he received both his master's degree in 1915 and his PhD in 1917. He wrote his PhD thesis, ''Certain Types of Geodesic Motion of a Surface of Negative Curvature'', under the direction of George David Birkhoff. Morse was a Benjamin Peirce Instructor at Harvard in 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jacques Hadamard
Jacques Salomon Hadamard (; 8 December 1865 – 17 October 1963) was a French mathematician who made major contributions in number theory, complex analysis, differential geometry and partial differential equations. Biography The son of a teacher, Amédée Hadamard, of Jewish descent, and Claire Marie Jeanne Picard, Hadamard was born in Versailles, France and attended the Lycée Charlemagne and Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where his father taught. In 1884 Hadamard entered the École Normale Supérieure, having placed first in the entrance examinations both there and at the École Polytechnique. His teachers included Tannery, Hermite, Darboux, Appell, Goursat and Picard. He obtained his doctorate in 1892 and in the same year was awarded the for his essay on the Riemann zeta function. In 1892 Hadamard married Louise-Anna Trénel, also of Jewish descent, with whom he had three sons and two daughters. The following year he took up a lectureship in the University of Bordeaux, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henri Lebesgue
Henri Léon Lebesgue (; June 28, 1875 – July 26, 1941) was a French mathematician known for his theory of integration, which was a generalization of the 17th-century concept of integration—summing the area between an axis and the curve of a function defined for that axis. His theory was published originally in his dissertation ''Intégrale, longueur, aire'' ("Integral, length, area") at the University of Nancy during 1902. Personal life Henri Lebesgue was born on 28 June 1875 in Beauvais, Oise. Lebesgue's father was a typesetter and his mother was a school teacher. His parents assembled at home a library that the young Henri was able to use. His father died of tuberculosis when Lebesgue was still very young and his mother had to support him by herself. As he showed a remarkable talent for mathematics in primary school, one of his instructors arranged for community support to continue his education at the Collège de Beauvais and then at Lycée Saint-Louis and Lycée L ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leonida Tonelli
Leonida Tonelli (19 April 1885 – 12 March 1946) was an Italian mathematician, noted for creating Tonelli's theorem, a variation of Fubini's theorem, and for introducing semicontinuity methods as a common tool for the direct method in the calculus of variations. Education Tonelli graduated from the University of Bologna in 1907; his Ph.D. thesis was written under the direction of Cesare Arzelà. Work Selected publications * , 1900 * . Zanichelli, Bologna, vol. 1: 1922, vol. 2: 1923 * * . Zanichelli, Bologna 1928 See also *Calculus of variations *Fourier series * Lebesgue integral * Mathematical analysis Notes References Biographical and general references *. The "''Yearbook''" of the renowned Italian scientific institution, including an historical sketch of its history, the list of all past and present members as well as a wealth of information about its academic and scientific activities. *, available from thBiblioteca Digitale Italiana di Matematica *. "''The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
