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16:00
@TedShifrin let me know when your here
Hello chat.
What's everyone up to?
good morning
hey @Fargle
got 100 % in my geometry exam
so happy
16:08
Awesome, @Adeek!
I fucked up though in analysis but I did good in algebra.
nice @adeek :)
I had 3 exams right next to each other I was bound to do bad somewhere :S
Jeez, that sounds rough. Glad you made it through though.
thanks @Fargle
yeah I had modern algebra,functional analysis, and geometry right next to each other haha
have you guys heard of habitica before ?
It is a cool software that keeps track of your schedule and if you do it, then you level up your character otherwise it doesn't level up
it is a cool way to schedule your time.
16:13
I have not, but that sounds valuable.
yeah it is pretty cool
Hello @Balarka.
hi @BalarkaSen
16:23
it snowed
Snowed here too
what is snow?
Got about 6in overnight
Next up: really cold
i must finish doing my Ted-cercises
im not sure what to do for this one though
My weather app on my phone shows -20 F at this time tomorrow...
Weeee minnesota
16:30
Fahrenheit...
about -28C
-30 celsius
It's about -15 C right now
Exercise: prove that for any ordered field $(S,+,\circ,\preceq)$, we have $0 \preceq x \preceq 1 \implies x^2 < x$.
And with winds it'll feel even colder
Hence I don't want to spend any time outside tomorrow if I can help it
Good day to stay inside and grade final exams :P
gah -30C sucks
soon it'll be siberia instead of minnesota
16:39
prove that $a^3+2b^3+4c^3-6abc=0\implies a=b=c=0$
(Associativity check by putting the two light's associativity test tables on top of each other)
All elements in a cayley table:

Def 1: Given a magma $(M,\circ)$ of $n$ elements. Let $S$ be a $1 \times n$ matrix or $n \times 1$ matrix where its entries are elements $a \in M$. The cayley table is then given by the outer product $T=S \otimes S$, which is a $n \times n$ matrix. For all matrices, the tranpose is defined in the usual way, thus $(T^\textrm{T})^\textrm{T}=T$

Rows and columns

Def 2: Rows and columns of the cayley table are given in the usual way: For all $i\in M$, $T_{ai}$ is the
@BalarkaSen Well, we do have quite a few Russian profs...
sorry, typo:
defines a left magma action and $T_{xi}b=\{u\circ b, v \circ b,w \circ b,\cdots, k \circ b\}$ defines a right magma action. Therefore in general $aT_{xi}\neq T_{xi}a$.
Is there anyway to formalize the "zigzag" proof for the cardinality of N^2?
16:44
I have a bunch of questions open in my tab that I want to answer but I am too lazy
I've had them open since like the morning
@xpmrz There's a formula for that somewhere, I guess wikipedia
gah I forgot to state they have to be rational
proofwiki.org/wiki/… Though the proof by prime decomposition is neat, I think it would be nice if there were a formal proof of the former
@Krijn I'm not sure about the right keyword to search
@BalarkaSen do it
@BalarkaSen @Semiclassical here it is like -35
16:47
@BalarkaSen I've got a book on Hodge theory to look at myself
ugh. Where-ish are you? @Adeek
edmonton @Semiclassical
I answered one a few minutes ago, now looking at another
Ah, Canada
yeah
I am also originally from Egypt so I spent a lot of time getting used to this weather haha
Relative to the rest of the continental USA, Minnesota is cold. Relative to North America as a whole...
16:49
yeah Minnesota is one of the coldest places in US
It's like that one XKCD strip about math purity, except with Minnesota in place of chemistry and Canada in place of physics.
(alaska is Math in this analogy)
I think Canada is in place of math
All these people saying Alaska is colder than Canada, I'll have Nunavut!
bows head in shame
Mars is hotter than canada :D
We don't actually fare as badly in terms of snowfall as some places, though...
16:52
I live in TN. Snow is either a fairy tale or a debilitating week-long affair, with no in-between.
If there's so much as a hint of it, traffic goes down by about 95%.
Also, hi @Ted.
@Fargle: This will probably be my last January visit to ATL. It's too much of a risk that if there's 1/2 an inch of snow, I'll be stranded for days.
Oh, hi. :)
Glad to see @Balarka is being lazy.
@TedShifrin hi
Hi, Karim.
got 100 % in my geometry exam :D
@TedShifrin I'm not sure whether I'll be there or not. I'll have to talk to my brother, as he lives down there.
16:55
hi @ted
No big deal, Fargle. I just thought it might be cool.
Hi @Semiclassic
@TedShifrin It's just my default mode.
I will never forgot the proof of the fact that every complex compact connected lie group is torus.
Good, Karim. All of our bad influence on you.
very cool thing.
yeah exactly haha @TedShifrin.
16:56
@TedShifrin I agree! I just don't know everyone's plans vis-à-vis the holidays.
I don't usually mention complex manifolds in my introductory manifolds courses, but ... yes, it's an important result.
our class was weird @TedShifrin we pretty much covered everything but not in detail.
Teaching styles are different. When I taught that course at MIT many years ago, I covered most stuff in detail (including a lot of actual differential [Riemannian] geometry), but I only gave a vague sketch of a proof of the Hodge theorem. I didn't want to spend two weeks on that instead of actual geometry.
we did real and complex manifold, Lie groups, tangent bundle tangent space, vector bundles, complex line bundles, Riemannian manifolds, Hermitian manifolds, vector fields, Exponential map, differential forms, deRham cohomology, and introductory hodge theory.
I prefer your teaching style.
@TedShifrin
we even did some kahler manifold.
No wonder I spent most of my time on this class lol.
well, even though I specialized in complex differential geometry, I didn't stick that stuff in a one-semester course. About 15 years ago, I had a graduate class that was all undergraduates and they were curious to see some complex geometry, so I spent half the second term on it.
It's actually good for you that you got to see that stuff, because it's what ties into algebraic geometry ideas.
17:03
cool.
I want to read a book on complex geometry.
It seems very interesting.
Reminds me, I borrowed a book on Hodge theory (Voisin vol 1, to be specific) yesterday
I hate it when I have a friend on FB and I have no idea who he is or how he became a friend.
lol
here's hoping I can actually get something out of it :P
I am closing this ** facebook and youtube.
They are huge waste of time
17:05
I've got a fb account, but I don't touch it
On the other hand, I watch a lot of youtube videos...
My students made me join FB over 10 years ago. It's all their fault.
Those dastardly millenials
yeah I always get distracted by either youtube or facebook. I think I will not close facebook or youtube but I will just block them.
It has the potential to be useful, but it's not
well, I like keeping in touch with friends from different eras ... but it's been tough during these political times.
17:07
ugh, politics
Can't we just get rid of politics
At least for the remainder of 2016
Fine with me, @Krijn.
Of course, math is political, too. :) We all have our tastes and we're very territorial :P
Sayre's law: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
hard to agree with that now
17:10
btw @TedShifrin I saw Eisenbudd commutative algebra seems like a good book.
True, @MikeM. However, as is the case in world politics, academia has its share of megalomaniacal, narcissistic prima donnas.
That's from the 70s, so a bit dated
@TedShifrin A professor of mine (a pretty good one actually) made the comment that "mathematics is just a leftwing hobby"
Still don't understand the remark
what @Krijn ?!
most people I know are liberal
17:12
I think it makes sense as one side of a distribution, a la this phdcomic: phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1910
I think most mathematicians are on the left of the political spectrum. Perhaps he's suggesting that he thinks math is not "useful" and therefore relegates it to a "hobby." I resent that remark.
Is left liberal ?
Depends on how left you go.
I never know what is the difference between left and right
Generally speaking, yes, Karim.
17:14
hi again
Quite broadly speaking, you could give the following spectrum going from left-to-right:
hi @Zach
radical, liberal, moderate, conservative, reactionary.
Where I study mathematics students are very left wing. Don't know why that is, though
Probably has a lot to do with cultural + economic factors
17:15
In general academia seems to be left wing
In the US, math/physics and history/sociology types tend to be more left. Engineering and business types tend to be more right. Total generality.
@Ted on the contrary, it makes me cringe at how true I feel it to be; at least about myself
Which? @MikeM
I lean with mike on this.
17:16
oh, hobby.
The extent to which abstract math tends to be disconnected to material conditions in the world is...worrisome
Well, let's see what happens when science is "destroyed" for the next few years ... and see how you feel.
why would it be "destroyed"?
Not sure what you're getting at.
The upcoming administration is vowing to destroy science, essentially.
17:18
um
ok
im going to work on my conics
Well, let's be clear: Vowing to destroy certain kinds of science, and specifically kinds which impact said material conditions.
So, @Semiclassic, @MikeM, do we dismiss literature and the arts, too? Does stuff have to be "useful" in some concrete way?
@Semiclassical You think so? I feel like the fact it is disconnected with the material world is part of why I like it.
@Zach: Still not done with #11?
no :( im feeling stupid again
17:19
@Ted No. I hope you know that's not what I'm arguing about.
i dont know what tools i have to prove collinearity besides cross-ratios and desargues (which i cant use)
Always good to take the time to look through the theorems of the chapter, @Zach.
wasn't one of the adminstration elon Musk @TedShifrin ?
@BalarkaSen Same for me
That I enjoy solitude at times doesn't stop me from worrying about whether I have enough social contact with the wider world.
17:20
I'm worried about the fact that, like you said, things are liable to get bad - and I'm just doing math
Or rather, I feel glad that it is. That's how strongly I feel about it.
I like it because there's this whole abstract world of mathematics, disjoint mostly from my physical world, and in a sense, much more beautiful and logical
Oh, yeah, I feel what Mike just said too. I don't know what to do about it.
a hobbyist who has refused to engage with more pressing needs
@MikeM: I don't kid myself that I would have had enough power/charisma to affect the world in a tangible way ... other than by teaching and mentoring thousands of students.
17:21
My concern more goes to whether said hobby tends to connect or disconnect myself from the wider world.
@Balarka start by volunteering
Shifrin 2020 :P
Hell no, @Zach.
i'm kidding
Ted do you remember the shoe banging incident?
17:21
Shifrinity now, Shifrinity forever. :P
Yes, @Sophie, I was a child of the 60s :)
getting in the world of politics is like jumping into a cage of hungry lions
[Abstract algebra] While associativity in general have a nice interpretation in terms of a map between rows of the table (as shwon in that reworked formulation with the help of other math chat users), the cayley table interpretation remains elusive for distributive law for general ring$n$oids
except some of the lions decide to protect you, and fight for you
please don't let that catchphrase be an excuse to be apolitical
17:22
Which?
@MikeMiller i mean, running for a political position
not discussing politics
yes, fine, but people need to do that too
@Secret: It bothered me years ago that we almost never verify associativity when presented the Cayley table for a group. There is some obscure proposition somewhere that we could apply (I've forgotten what it is).
I liked the political aspect in The Wire
Learned quite a bit about that
yeah, let them be lion tamers :)
17:23
Most of it depressing
you want a nice city, you need a nice city council.
One rather cumbersome algorithm that always works is Light's associativity test. However there are more efficient algorithms to check associativity.

I guess one reason for that is that since we work with groups, we already assume they are associative.
One point I want to make, re: math versus art esp. narrative: The latter can be about people and the world, in a way that math generally is not.
@Secret: Part of it is that groups generally have faithful matrix representations (or appear as a group of actions on a set), and functions are associative.
17:26
@TedShifrin do you think i could apply Pascal here? i mean it doesnt really seem like it but it has to do with collinear points and conics
@Semiclassic: I guess I'm thinking of culture in general. And math is part of it.
It may be an illusion, but art/literature can open one's mind to perspectives and cultures that one would otherwise not encounter. Math in and of itself doesn't do that.
@TedShifrin Yeah, groups and in general semigroups and associative algebras can be handled under representation theory
Well, since it has important relevant ingredients, @Zach, perhaps you should play with it.
@TedShifrin I think an even bigger part is that any group we really care about will have a better description than a Cayley table (which is not really a good description for any purpose)
17:27
@Tobias: Yeah, that was what I was hinting at with actions.
Now, the thing which counters that to some extent: To the extent that math is a collaborative discipline, one does encounter other people and their viewoints.
cayley tables are only good for small finite strucrtures. For infinite structures, we rely on the generating sets and other properties (e.g. for groups, what are their subgroups, their quotient groups and cosets etc.)
But one then goes back to the empirical question of which people tend to do academic-level math, and that again leads to a selection bias.
@Secret They are not even really good for small structures
Graphs tend, in my mind, to be most useful for sparse structures.
The more dense the connections, the less likely it is to be a useful visualization.
17:30
@Semiclassical Art has something that simply cannot be analysed. It often give you a highly subjective feeling, which can only be understood after learning and experience all the context, history and culture that the artwork is based on
One example is how two different pieces of music can give a simialr impression, despite with disimialr melodies and arragnements
@MikeMiller I feel like I should; sitting on the cozy corner of the room and doing math while people die of hunger (in this part of the world, at least) is certainly not what I'd want to be. But it's more complicated than that, because I only see apathy in the people around me; they like to live in their bubble of ignorance, who have taken up hedonism as their philosophy of life. Only petty politics seem to concern them, not suffering and death of people, and indeed, of humanity.
I see some people taking up initiatives, perhaps guided by a pang of feeling that something needs to be done, but not enough effort or thought goes into it. Or maybe I am just young and confused, and it's really as simple as that: just start by doing something. I just don't want to be The Underground Man, who realizes what's wrong, but is always too afraid to act and covers it up with his twisted, seemingly irrefutable logic.
if everyone waited to exterminate hunger before doing math today we would have no math and much more hunger
Tobias: Well for very preliminary investigation of an algebraic structure, it does give an intuitive way to see where the inverses, identity and commutative elements are. But as one go deeper (at least for groups and rings), it becomes very cumbersome to list all the entries out. For infinite structure, it is impossible to draw a cayley table on paper and thus we need more advanced theorem that is covered in group, ring etc. theoreis
Groups are nice in this regard because a lot of properties of groups are controlled by their subgroups and quotient groups
@Balarka: Those are very valid feelings and concerns. I walk past homeless people every day and feel powerless to do anything other than contribute money every month that goes to feed the homeless and others in need. ...
@Secret I would say that as soon as the number of elements get large enough that there are more than very few different possible groups, Cayley tables stop being in any way feasible to use.
17:35
@Sophie That's true as a whole, but do you really think that's an excuse for not doing something? Does that not undermine the suffering those people go through while we enjoy our lives? Is that not inherently vulgar, albeit logical?
Or maybe it's just me.
@TedShifrin It feels really weird here in the Netherlands to walk past a homeless beggar and to be discouraged to give them money (by the police/government)
@Krijn: Especially after some very personal recent experiences, I worry that money will go to booze and serious drugs, not food. Hence my preference to give money that I know will go to food for people who need it. But people handle this in ways they're comfortable with. It's all very sad.
@TedShifrin Thanks, it's good to hear someone reflect on similar thoughts.
What I dislike in this discussion is how it treats 'human suffering' as inevitable and just a fact of life---or, at least, the extent to which we tend not to tal about the conditions which produce it.
@Semiclassic: It's inevitable that we come back to politics, but it's clear in the US how many people there are who are totally self-concerned ... and it's only going to get worse.
17:39
Tobias: In other news, with the help of Astyx and DHMO, I managed to fix nearly all the math error I have committed when trying to formalise the notion of mapping rows to rows that is mentioned to you and a few other earlier.

I agree (as my experience showed the number of possible structures that I have been investigating for n=4 increase very quickly, even though the associativity algorithm formulated previously managed to make it still rather manageable on paper), I planned to move beyond cayley tables soon after I have understood well enough how to handle the other ways to investigate u
@TedShifrin This is of course exactly the reason why it is even forbidden to beg in the city
@Secret By the way, I am not sure they are called Cayley tables when it is not a group. They are just composition tables
@MikeMiller I guess here's a question: To what extent can math be public rather than private? I guess that's one way of framing the whole hobby versus occupation thing.
I see... (I do recall my linear algebra professors just refer them as multiplication tables)

Dealing with semigroups and near semirings are not as easy though because they don't have as many nice shortcuts and theorems that can be used to analyse them. Semigroups are still easy to manage because the set of idempotents governs most of the properties of semigroups, while for near semiring, they are very weak structures thus to better understand them, I suspect a universal algebra approach will be better as there are only a few axioms needed to be inputted into the structure
Certainly there's a public component, but it's a very narrow notion of such. It's in that sense where it ends up appearing apolitical.
(to the extent that it's not, it's because choosing not to engage in politics is itself a political choice.)
17:45
@Secret Are you familiar with Green's relations?
@Balarka: Choose something and do it for 3 or so hours a week. Make your own small difference.
Cannot say I am very familar, while a month ago I do have them jotted down in my notes, I read only a little more than the definitions. They kinda remind of cosets however
Good advice for everyone, @MikeM.
I didn't realize that I stumbled into the life and deep stuff SE chat.
:)
@Secret They are probably the main tool to get started understanding the structure of semigroups
And they also have analogues in more complicated structures, such as multisemigroups and via those certain types of algebras and $2$-categories
17:49
@Semiclassical I find this an uninspiring question since for me the problem isn't whether there's a minute difference in the world of mathematicians, I think the joy there is conoletely countetacted by the suffering I have done nothing for elsewhere
re-reading the green relationwikipedia page wait I thought quasigroups are the one where divisbility is a necessarity, while semigroups are just associative magmas?
@Secret quasigroups have some weird version of divisibility. semigroups are indeed just those with an associative binary operation
I see
@MikeMiller Oh, I agree. That's actually what I was getting at: That the principle 'public' aspect of mathematics is so narrowly defined.
What I'm really wondering is to what extent it 'has to be' like that.
@MikeMiller That is indeed good advice. If it was a few months ago, I would have said that's an oversimplification and that so small a difference would do nothing at all. But now I don't think I believe in that anymore. You are right about this.
17:52
@Semiclassical I wonder what a broadening of the public scope of mathematics would entail.
@BalarkaSen Down that road lies nihilism. Internally consistent, but you'll be unhappy, as will the people you haven't helped.
Good evening everybody
I don't do much, but I do a little. I don't know if my little is enough. It's something I'll have to figure out in the next few years.
To what extent can math be genuinely political? Mathematicians as people can be so, of course, but to the extent that math/physics feel like a hobby to me it's because they just don't seem to matter to the world at large.
To be cynical is to contribute to the factors that lend themselves to cynicism.
17:55
Hi @Alessandro
@Semiclassical The different attempts to formalize gerrymandering are I think the most prominent example of math as applied to politics. (Besides statistics, of course.)
@Fargle: Be careful where you stumble.
@TedShifrin Yeah. Given my height I could take out a whole crowd. >_>
Yeah, you and your leaping.
And, really, there is a large extent to which math already is used to political ends. (Modern economics being a key example). It's just not the kind of math that we find interesting.
It might be an impoverished kind of math from our perspective, but it is math.
17:59
I think part of the problem there is that politics, at least for now, escapes the grasp of the structure and abstraction inherent in, for lack of a better word, "higher" math.
"Once upon a time, long ago... an old monk lived in an orthodox monastery. His name was Pamve. And once he planted a barren tree on a mountainside just like this. Then he told his young pupil, a monk named Ioann Kolov, that he should water the tree each day until it came to life.
Anyway, early every morning Ioann filled a bucket with water and went out. He climbed up the mountain and watered the withered tree and in the evening when darkness had fallen he returned to the monastery. He did this for three years. And one fine day, he climbed up the mountain and saw that the whole tree was cove
I don't know if it's true but I have started believing in this little by little. Maybe that means I should try it.
The part of that story which I key into is the location of the tree.
That it's not at the monastery, i.e. not at home, but at a place that requires travel and patience.
It requires a willingness not just water to a tree, but to bring water to a place.
Translating this into an academic context: To what extent do our various efforts end up just watering plants in a convenient place?
18:17
Hi all
Salut, @Astyx.
Comment vas-tu ?
Bien, merci, et toi?
En vacances, donc ça va
Formidable :)
18:26
the moon landings were closer to the Ottoman empire than to today
Harvard is older than Calculus
@Sophie Similarly, the last time the Cubs won the World Series before this year, the Ottoman Empire still existed.
> Using the normal Axioms for Fields, prove in $\mathbb{R}$ that $(-1)(x) = -x$.
Is saying $(-1)(x) = - (1\cdot x) = -x \ \ \square \ $ incorrect as a proof?
yes it is incorrect
Okay, but why so?
18:42
What justifies the first equality ?
(except intuition)
You just assumed what you were trying to prove.
how do you define "$-x$"?
DHMO and I went around this exact thing for a half hour yesterday. I posted a correct proof :)
$x + (-1)x = (1-1)x =0x = 0$ thus $(-1)x = -x$
You need to prove that $0\cdot x=0$, however. That's the crucial thing.
18:45
$-x$ wasn't defined explicitly. One of the field axioms is that $\forall x, \exists \text{ a unique } y $ such that $x + y = 0$, and (by intuition I guess) this $y$ turns out to be $-x$
Yes, $-x$ is defined to be the additive inverse.
$0x + 0x = (0+0)x = 0x$ thus $0x = 0$
OK. :)
What's an anagram of Banach-Tarski ?
(bad joke incomming)
closes eyes and ears
18:47
we know this one
@TedShifrin, I'm currently reading through Munkres: Topology - A First Course and Baby Rudin, and Munkres refers to the Axioms for Fields as properties of $\mathbb{R}$, can Axioms themselves be properties?
Meh.
@Astyx, thanks for the proof above btw :)
My pleasure !
Sure. Although I want to have the shortest possible list of axioms, and then derive further properties (such as what we were just discussing). The properties Munkres lists (under Assumption) are the usual axioms.
18:49
Try and do it again in some time, just to make sure you understand its concept :)
@TedShifrin On the other hand, one can also make the list of axioms too short for practical purposes (without actually changing anything)
@TedShifrin, Not sure why but I always thought axioms and properties were mutually exclusive in some sense. Thanks for clearing that up. Also is this a similar situation to the Archimedian Property of $\mathbb{R}$ also being referred to as the Axiom of Archimedes?
I think we all agree on the axiom list for the real numbers as an ordered field (and the completeness axiom can be thrown in, too), @Tobias.
@TedShifrin Probably yes, but there are items on that list that could be left out without changing anything (such as commutativity of addition), but doing so would be unusual
What axioms are you discussing about ?
18:54
@Tobias: I sure want to know that addition is commutative! How can we omit that?
@TedShifrin because it follows from the existence of a multiplicative unit, the two distributive laws and cancellation of addition
@Perturbative: The Archimedean property is implied by the fact that $\Bbb N$ is unbounded above. So if we have completeness (the least upper bound property), this will follow.
Agh, OK, @Tobias. I've never thought that through.
Would it make sense to have a Möbius function for twin primes?
@TedShifrin Yeah, it is a not very well-known thing, and not really relevant for most purposes
For pedagogical reasons, I will keep the commutative law (but not list $0\cdot x=0$ in any ring) :P
18:56
@TedShifrin I definitely agree with those choices
Are you discussing the axioms for a ring ?
@Astyx yes

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