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Following up on the previous MO question "Are there any important mathematical concepts without discrete analogue?", I'd like to ask the opposite: what are examples of notions in math that were not originally discrete, but have good discrete analogues? While a few examples arose in the answers t...
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continuity seems to have no coherent use. It has 3 watchers for 88 questions, which is a very low ratio (compared to tags with a comparable number of questions).
It's mostly to mean some use of continuity, often somewhere fitting with real-analysis, gn.general-topology, and others. This number o...
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I am trying to explain how and why discrete maths is used in areas such as programming, correctness, data types, state transistion and conditionals. I'm having a really hard time articulating it though! Can anyone point me in the right direction of some resources or help shed some light on it ple...
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Maximizing a monotone submodular function with a cardinality constraint can be solved by using a simple greedy heuristic. However, if the submodular function is non-monotone, the greedy heuristic can perform arbitrarily poorly.
Now I have a very special non-monotone submodular function:
$$G(S)=F...
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Some results by Donaldson were simplified via the Seiberg-Witten invariants.
From Wikipedea: Seiberg–Witten invariants are similar to Donaldson invariants and can be used to prove similar (but sometimes slightly stronger) results about smooth 4-manifolds. They are technically much easier to work...
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Tverberg Theorem (1965): Let $ x_1,x_2,\dots, x_m$ be points in $ R^d$, $ m \ge (r-1)(d+1)+1$. Then there is a partition $ S_1,S_2,\dots, S_r$ of $ \{1,2,\dots,m\}$ such that $\cap _{j=1}^rconv (x_i: i \in S_j) \ne \emptyset$.
Tverberg's theorem was conjectured by Birch who also proved the plana...
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How to evaluate this integral:
$$\int_0^1 \int_0^1 \cdots \int_0^1\frac{x_{1}^2+x_{2}^2+\cdots+x_{n}^2}{x_{1}+x_{2}+\cdots+x_{n}}dx_{1}\, dx_{2}\cdots \, dx_{n}=?$$
I'm making use of the integral identity:
$$\int_{0}^{+\infty }e^{-t(x_{1}+x_{2}\cdots +x_{n})}dt=\frac{1}{x_{1}+x_{2}\cdots +x_{n}}$...
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