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00:00 - 21:0021:00 - 00:00

21:00
Astyx is the sorting hat?
and what would be a good pun on Gryffindor ? 🤔
Grief indoor
Party outdoor
thats dark
Door [], Mordor [][][], Gondor
Gryffindor [griffin.jpg]
One does not simply walk into Gryffindor
@JoeShmo thats not dark thats our reality
thats true
21:03
Indoor parties are not allowed because of covid-19 anyway
Puttin' the "play" in "plague"
nice
nobody does it better
nobody. believe me folks
21:28
Hi @Ted
21:41
Evening
I don't know... I guess they haven't got a function that gives both the circular functions and hyperbolic functions in one, do they?
Hi, a @Balarka.
$\sqrt{|1-x^2|} = \sqrt{|x^2 - 1|}$, so...
I guess that answers my question of why using it as the argument to cosh(x) makes such a good cosine approximation...
@TedShifrin Today I had a differential geometry assignment which asked us to figure out what osculating circles are really about.
21:48
Hi, demonic @Alessandro.
What are they really about?
Three-point contact?
Yeah, but the problem was something vague along the lines of: If you take circle tangential to a point p on the curve of smaller radius than the osculating radius then a small patch on the curve around p lies outside the circle
I always thought they should be considered the second-order approximation to the curve. I never knew what third order should mean though.
Oh, plane curves, not space curves?
Yeah plane curves sorry
Maybe approximation by helices
Oh
Then I definitely don't know what a third order approximation is
Man I'm so ignorant of all this
21:56
Osculating sphere comes next, @MikeM.
That's four-point contact for a space curve.
I didn't bother to make his problem precise. Here is my reformulation of his problem. Consider the normal map to the curve in R^2, given by f(t, s) = gamma(t) + s*N
I have an exercise on this ... although it's a bit cumbersome.
The centers of osculating circles are focal points ie singularities of f
Right, @Balarka.
And that's so much cleaner!
21:57
I like the contact order stuff, too, though.
Yeah I should learn that better
It's in the spirit of (classical) algebraic geometry :P
You literally take the point and two other points on the curve; there's a unique circle through those. The limit of that circle as the two points collapse to the fixed point is the osculating circle. (Warm-up is tangent line as limit of secant lines.)
That makes sense. I hadn't thought of it like this.
Similar to your exercise, @Balarka, is the observation that of all planes containing the tangent line to a space curve, only the osculating plane has the property that the curve lies (locally) on both sides of it.
That's kind of nonobvious, you'd think you can break that by taking something like a damped twisted cubic, so that one side lies above the plane and one side below
But no
I think the corresponding statement for the osculating circle is just false. Something like the graph of $x^2 - x^3$
22:04
Well, I was thinking of your statement that if you pick the wrong circle then the curve is part outside.
Yeah, but you can't say anything about what happens to the curve at the osculating circle. I think the curve can lie on both sides of the osculating circle.
For radius less than $1/\kappa$ or greater than $1/\kappa$ you can
Hmm, no, if you have nonzero curvature, the curve is wholly outside the osculating circle locally.
I don't agree. Look at graph of $f(x) = x^2 - x^3$, at $x = 0$.
The osculating circle is the one of radius $1/2$
The curve lies inside on one side and outside on another
I think you're wrong.
Taylor says you're wrong.
22:07
So does a graph.
How?
The red curve is inside the blue circle on one side, outside on another.
Hmm, OK, you win.
I guess the point is that — re Taylor — you subtract off exactly the same quadratic term, and what's left is the cubic.
So I guess my plane fact is probably not quite analogous.
Yeah, and this is exactly a cusp behavior ($x^3$ lies on both sides of the tangent line at $x = 0$)
Somehow you don't see it for the osculating plane but I don't know why. You'd think a twisted cubic would do the trick
22:13
Locally, every curve looks like the twisted cubic (see Local Canonical Form). I edited my original claim. The curve is on both sides of the osculating plane; but it's the only plane with that property (containing tangent line).
Ah
I did not know the local canonical form
There's a LOT about curves I don't know
I guess you didn't do very many of my exercises :P
I mostly did surfaces from your book.
Maybe one of these weekends I will sit down and do a few from curves
better than vague assignments
22:17
Who's vague?
The sea
leaves
"interpret the osculating circle"
Les vagues d'antin?
Les vagues -> Lebesgue
But les bagues means the rings, not the waves.
22:19
Oh haha
Le bègue means the stutterer
I didn't know that word, @Astyx.
@Balarka: I think most of my exercises are typically well-defined.
Ya that's my experience
Hey guys I have a revolutionary idea: if I use circular reasoning, then I can get the circular functions.
rolls $\pi + \sqrt e$ eyes.
22:23
is it clear if that's even irrational
probably open
What, I'm not being too hyperbolic, am I?
It's a critical hit !
We'd prefer a little more ellipses.
No, I'd rather him get to the point.
Unfortunately the margin in this chat is too small
22:24
Would ya, now?
He passed the point of no return days ago, @Balarka.
@Astyx as Eric de Tanayama said
Try this on for elliptical: $\cos^{2}(x) + \sin^{2}(y) = x^{2} + y^{2}$ (if I remember correctly)
Pardon my ignorance, but who's that ?
cousin of Srinivasa Nakayama
22:28
Has there been much work, though, with absolute value and algebra?
I don't exactly see |x| in a lot of the things I've seen or read.
6
Q: How do we define the reward function for an environment?

HazzaldoHow do you actually decide what reward value to give for each action in a given state for an environment? Is this purely experimental and down to the programmer of the environment? So, is it a heuristic approach of simply trying different reward values and see how the learning process shapes up? ...

if you are interested in RL ;)
Because this sort of stuff here is actually rather new to me: wolframalpha.com/input/…
I mean it just casually contains the inverse circular functions in it...
@AMDG What is that even supposed to mean ?
@Astyx what specifically?
The message I responded to
22:33
Oh that
Well for one, I notice that sometimes if I just wrap something in absolute value on wolfram, I can't get an infinite series... which is weird...
Derivatives and integrals with that are quite interesting, too.
It's totally not weird. $|x|$ is not even differentiable at $0$.
For me it is.
Power series are infinitely differentiable. Something without the first derivative is pretty hopeless.
If you do $|\cos x|$ it won't care, because near $0$ the cosine function is always positive. But you won't get any information outside of $[-\pi/2,\pi/2]$.
Convert $|x|$ to piecewise and differentiate the parts?
Doesn't work.
It only works away from $0$. You can't do a power series expansion at $0$.
For the reason I already gave.
22:40
Ok
You will only get information on a domain where the function is real analytic.
Nondifferentiable analytic functions
Only 90s kids will remember
Analytic functions on a point
Checkmate
Points are pointless.
Speaking of osculating circles... I'm trying to understand the representation of curvature by the common convention $k = \frac{1}{R}$. What exactly does it mean to have $k$ curvature?
22:43
1 curvature 2 curvature 3 curvature
boom
k curvature
I was thinking, y'know, maybe there's a way to take a line segment that I can curve into an arc as part of a circle and in that way get arbitrary/linear rotation...
What's $R$ ?
radius of linear rotation
@Astyx 1/k
bedlam ensues
22:45
Fair.
Formal mathematics: Pass to the free algebra on all math terms and work there.
Lose all relations, huh?
@BalarkaSen Isn't that what this chat is all about ?
Yes, so "linear rotation" starts making sense
It's like the trained infinite monkey theorem
22:53
Every theorem has been stated and proved in the free algebra of formal mathematics.
We just need to pass to the right quotient
Which is left as an exercise for the reader
The free mathematical theory, free in particular of rigor and internal consistency
3
I think I need to mod out this chatroom.
It's pretty much all torsion.
22:56
we need more italians
Isn't Alessandro enough?
What does it mean for complex function on a simply connected domain to be smooth?
But how to rotate linearly without sine or cosine functions cheaply, though...
Does it mean that it is infinitely differentiable?
@Astyx I'm not sure why you say so, but I agree
23:00
I.e., the n-th order derivative exists for every $n \in \Bbb{N}$?
Mods have their name in italics no ?
Don't .... me. That's the reasoning you gave me 2 years ago or something
How come you knew we were talking about you ?
Really, though, how do you travel along the circumference of a circle in a Euclidean plane without circular functions or complex numbers?
My spider sense was tingling
(I still had chat open in a tab and I checked what you were all talking about before going to sleep)
23:04
Unfortunate
Does anyone know what a smoothness of a complex function means?
Now sleep is no longer an option
@user193319 the smoothness of a function is how many times you can differentiate it
What if the number of times it is differentiable isn't specified? The problem just states that a complex function is smooth.
smooth means infinitely differentiable
The first column is discrete subgroups of $SO(3)$
Or, well, its pullback to the double cover $SU(2)$
The second column is the ideal $I$ such that $\Bbb C[x, y]/I$ is ring of invariants of this group acting on $\Bbb C^2$
The third column is some $ADE$ thing I don't understand
The type of singularity $V(I)$ has at the origin is special, according to Arnold
I imagine germs of these functions $f : (\Bbb C^2, 0) \to (\Bbb C, 0)$, $I = (f)$, are exactly what are of interest
23:12
germs D:
Ok these are the only "simple singular germs" upto $\mathcal{A}$-equivalence
@BalarkaSen Sorry but the third column is clearly $ADEEE$
lol
Oh wow
What is ADE?
The minimal resolution for $V(I)$ at the origin can be described as follows; the exceptional divisors under iterated blowups are a bunch of $\Bbb{CP}^1$'s lying above $0 \in V(I)$. All of these have self-intersection number -2. The way these pairwise intersect are described by the Dynkin diagrams, according to the last column
23:17
Too controversial, had to toss that opinion in the heap
LOL
I remember seeing the $E_8$ in connection with the Poincare homology sphere before, which is link of $x^2 + y^3 + z^5 = 0$
I'm going to guess ADE is a kind of differential equation.
I don't remember though. I thought you take a bunch of links according to the $E_8$ and then do something
@MikeMiller Do you remember this construction
Yeah, you can represent Poincare as surgery on something that looks like the Dynkin diagram. (Unknots for each vertex which are linked in order bases on the edges)
If you think of it instead as a handle diagram you get the E8 manifold w boundary P
Can you teach me this picture sometime? Not today maybe because I have to sleep
Just this picture.
On Zoom if you want
If you have time someday
23:22
If $f : D \to \Bbb{C}$ is a function, where $D$ is simply connected, what does it mean to say that $f(z)dz$ is either closed or exact?
I know what it means for $Pdx + Qdy$ to be exact or closed and everything is real...but what happens when you move over to $\Bbb{C}$?
A TABLE OF GENUS TWO HANDLEBODY-KNOTS UP TO SIX CROSSINGS
That's what I get
@BalarkaSen Honestly I don't really know it
We can try to think through it together slowly
I don't have time in the near future though
@Astyx It skips the paywall and goes straight to the paper?
Oh no, it requires registration or login to access
Oh whoop
So you can't see the PDF
23:40
Not if I don't pay it seems
@user193319 a closed form is the differential of a form, an exact one is one such that its differential is 0
@Astyx What about this link
"View article" at the top, and a little tab that says "PDF" on the side, both work for me without paying
"PDF" sends me back to the first link
Hm, damn
Oh I see
It detected my Yale account somehow
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