# Integration trick

Here’s a clever example from Paul Nahin’s new book Inside Interesting Integrals. Suppose you want to evaluate

Since the range of integration is symmetric around zero, you might think to see whether the integrand is an odd function, in which case the integral would be zero. (More on such symmetry tricks here.) Unfortunately, the integrand is not odd, so that trick doesn’t work directly. However, it does help indirectly.

You can split any function f(x) into its even and odd parts.

The integral of a function over a symmetric interval is the integral of its even part because its odd part integrates to zero. The even part of the integrand above works out to be simply cos(x)/2 and so the integral evaluates to sin(1).

# John Napier

Julian Havil has written a new book John Napier: Life, Logarithms, and Legacy.

I haven’t read more than the introduction yet — a review copy arrived just yesterday — but I imagine it’s good judging by who wrote it. Havil’s book Gamma is my favorite popular math book. (Maybe I should say “semi-popular.” Havil’s books have more mathematical substance than most popular books, but they’re still aimed at a wide audience. I think he strikes a nice balance.) His latest book is a scientific biography, a biography with an unusual number of equations and diagrams.

Napier is best known for his discovery of logarithms. (People debate endlessly whether mathematics is discovered or invented. Logarithms are so natural — pardon the pun — that I say they were discovered. I might describe other mathematical objects, such as Grothendieck’s schemes, as inventions.) He is also known for his work with spherical trigonometry, such as Napier’s mnemonic. Maybe Napier should be known for other things I won’t know about until I finish reading Havil’s book.

# The great reformulation of algebraic geometry

“Tate helped shape the great reformulation of arithmetic and geometry which has taken place since the 1950’s.” — Andrew Wiles

At the Heidelberg Laureate Forum I has a chance to interview John Tate. In his remarks below, Tate briefly comments on his early work on number theory and cohomology. Most of the post consists of his comments on the work of Alexander Grothendieck.

***

JT: My first significant work after my thesis was to determine the cohomology groups of class field theory. The creators of the theory, including my thesis advisor Emil Artin, didn’t think in terms of cohomology, but their work could be interpreted as finding the cohomology groups H0, H1, and H2.

I was invited to give a series of three talks at MIT on class field theory. I’d been at a party, and I came home and thought about what I’d talk about. And I got this great idea: I realized I could say what all the higher groups are. In a sense it was a disappointing answer, though it didn’t occur to me then, that there’s nothing new in them; they were determined by the great work that had already been done. For that I got the Cole prize in number theory.

Later when I gave a talk on this work people would say “This is number theory?!” because it was all about cohomology groups.

JC: Can you explain what the great reformulation was that Andrew Wiles spoke of? Was it this greater emphasis on cohomology?

JT: Well, in the class field theory situation it would have been. And there I played a relatively minor part. The big reformulation of algebraic geometry was done by Grothendieck, the theory of schemes. That was really such a great thing, that unified number theory and algebraic geometry. Before Grothendieck, going between characteristic 0, finite characteristic 2, 3, etc. was a mess.

Grothendieck’s system just gave the right framework. We now speak of arithmetic algebraic geometry, which means studying problems in number theory by using your geometric intuition. The perfect background for that is the theory of schemes. ….

Grothendieck ideas [about sheaves] were so simple. People had looked at such things in particular cases: Dedekind rings, Noetherian rings, Krull rings, …. Grothendieck said take any ring. … He just had an instinct for the right degree of generality. Some people make things too general, and they’re not of any use. But he just had an instinct to put whatever theory he thought about in the most general setting that was still useful. Not generalization for generalization’s sake but the right generalization. He was unbelievable.

He started schemes about the time I got serious about algebraic geometry, as opposed to number theory. But the algebraic geometers classically had affine varieties, projective varieties, … It seemed kinda weird to me. But with schemes you had a category, and that immediately appealed to me. In the classical algebraic geometry there are all these birational maps, or rational maps, and they’re not defined everywhere because they have singularities. All of that was cleared up immediately from the outset with schemes. ….

There’s a classical algebraic geometer at Harvard, Joe Harris, who works mostly over the complex numbers. I asked him whether Grothedieck made much of a difference in the classical case — I knew for number theorists he had made a tremendous difference — and Joe Harris said yes indeed. It was a revolution for classical algebraic geometry too.

# Uses for orthogonal polynomials

When I interviewed Daniel Spielman at this year’s Heidelberg Laureate Forum, we began our conversation by looking for common mathematical ground. The first thing that came up was orthogonal polynomials. (If you’re wondering what it means for two polynomials to be orthogonal, see here.)

JC: Orthogonal polynomials are kind of a lost art, a topic that was common knowledge among mathematicians maybe 50 or 100 years ago and now they’re obscure.

DS: The first course I taught I spent a few lectures on orthogonal polynomials because they kept coming up as the solutions to problems in different areas that I cared about. Chebyshev polynomials come up in understanding solving systems of linear equations, such as if you want to understand how the conjugate gradient method behaves. The analysis of error correcting codes and sphere packing has a lot of orthogonal polynomials in it. They came up in a course in multi-linear algebra I had in grad school. And they come up in matching polynomials of graphs, which is something people don’t study much anymore. … They’re coming back. They come up a lot in random matrix theory. … There are certain things that come up again and again and again so you got to know what they are.

***

More from my interview with Daniel Spielman:

# Mathematical beauty

Michael Atiyah quoted Hermann Weyl in the opening talk at the second Heidelberg Laureate Forum:

I believe there is, in mathematics, in contrast to the experimental disciplines, a character which is nearer to that of free creative art.

There is evidence that the relation of artistic beauty and mathematical beauty is more than an analogy. Michael Atiyah recently published a paper with Semir Zeki et al that suggests the same part of the brain responds to both.

# Sum of geometric means

Let xn be a sequence of non-negative numbers. Then the sum of their running geometric means is bounded by e times their sum. In symbols

The inequality is strict unless all the x‘s are zero, and the constant e on the right side is optimal. Torsten Carleman proved this theorem in 1923.

# Inverted sense of risk

Watching the news gives you an inverted sense of risk.

We fear bad things that we’ve seen on the news because they make a powerful emotional impression. But the things rare enough to be newsworthy are precisely the things we should not fear. Conversely, the risks we should be concerned about are the ones that happen too frequently to make the news.

# Origins of category theory terms

From Saunders MacLane:

Now the discovery of ideas as general as these is chiefly the willingness to make a brash or speculative abstraction, in this case supported by the pleasure of purloining words from the philosophers: “Category” from Aristotle and Kant, “Functor’ from Carnap …, and “natural transformation” from the current informal parlance.

# Haskell analog of Sweave and Pweave

Sweave and Pweave are programs that let you embed R and Python code respectively into LaTeX files. You can display the source code, the result of running the code, or both.

lhs2TeX is roughly the Haskell analog of Sweave and Pweave.  This post takes the sample code I wrote for Sweave and Pweave before and gives a lhs2TeX counterpart.

\documentclass{article}
%include polycode.fmt
%options ghci
\long\def\ignore#1{}
\begin{document}

Invisible code that sets the value of the variable $a$.

\ignore{
\begin{code}
a = 3.14
\end{code}
}

Visible code that sets $b$ and squares it.

(There doesn't seem to be a way to display the result of a block of code directly.
Seems you have to save the result and display it explicitly in an eval statement.)

\begin{code}
b = 3.15
c = b*b
\end{code}

$b^2$ = \eval{c}

Calling Haskell inline: $\sqrt{2} = \eval{sqrt 2}$

Recalling the variable $a$ set above: $a$ = \eval{a}.

\end{document}


If you save this code to a file foo.lhs, you can run

lhs2TeX -o foo.tex foo.lhs

to create a LaTeX file foo.tex which you could then compile with pdflatex.

One gotcha that I ran into is that your .lhs file must contain at least one code block, though the code block may be empty. You cannot just have code in \eval statements.

Unlike R and Python, the Haskell language itself has a notion of literate programming. Haskell specifies a format for literate comments. lhs2TeX is a popular tool for processing literate Haskell files but not the only one.

# A subway topologist

One of my favorite books when I was growing up was the Mathematics volume in the LIFE Science Library. I didn’t own the book, but my uncle did, and I’d browse through the book whenever I visited him. I was too young at the time to understand much of what I was reading.

One of the pages that stuck in my mind was a photo of Samuel Eilenberg. His name meant nothing to me at the time, but the caption titled “A subway topologist” caught my imagination.

… Polish-born Professor Samuel Eilenberg sprawls contemplatively in his Greenwich Village apartment in New York City. “Sometimes I like to think lying down,” he says, “but mostly I like to think riding on the subway.” Mainly he thinks about algebraic topology — a field so abstruse that even among mathematicians few understand it. …

I loved the image of Eilenberg staring intensely at the ceiling or riding around on a subway thinking about math. Since then I’ve often thought about math while moving around, though usually not on a subway. I’ve only lived for a few months in an area with a subway system.

The idea that a field of math would be unknown to many mathematicians sounded odd. I had no idea at the time that mathematicians specialized.

Algebraic topology doesn’t seem so abstruse now. It’s a routine graduate course and you might get an introduction to it in an undergraduate course. The book was published in 1963, and I suppose algebraic topology would have been more esoteric at the time.

# Making change

How many ways can you make change for a dollar? This post points to two approaches to the problem, one computational and one analytic.

SICP gives a Scheme program to solve the problem:

(define (count-change amount) (cc amount 5))

(define (cc amount kinds-of-coins)
(cond ((= amount 0) 1)
((or (< amount 0) (= kinds-of-coins 0)) 0)
(else (+ (cc amount
(- kinds-of-coins 1))
(cc (- amount
(first-denomination
kinds-of-coins))
kinds-of-coins)))))

(define (first-denomination kinds-of-coins)
(cond ((= kinds-of-coins 1) 1)
((= kinds-of-coins 2) 5)
((= kinds-of-coins 3) 10)
((= kinds-of-coins 4) 25)
((= kinds-of-coins 5) 50)))


Concrete Mathematics explains that the number of ways to make change for an amount of n cents is the coefficient of z^n in the power series for the following:

Later on the book gives a more explicit but complicated formula for the coefficients.

Both show that there are 292 ways to make change for a dollar.

# A puzzle puzzle

Jigsaw puzzles that say they have 1,000 pieces have approximately 1,000 pieces, but probably not exactly 1,000. Jigsaw puzzle pieces are typically arranged in a grid, so the number of pieces along a side has to be a divisor of the total number of pieces. This means there aren’t very many ways to make a puzzle with exactly 1,000 pieces, and most have awkward aspect ratios.

Since jigsaw pieces are irregularly shaped, it may be surprising to learn that the pieces are actually arranged in a regular grid. At least they usually are. There are exceptions such as circular puzzles or puzzles that throw in a couple small pieces that throw off the grid regularity.

How many aspect ratios can you have with a rectangular grid of 1,000 points? Which ratio comes closest to the golden ratio? More generally, answer the same questions with 10^n points for positive integer n.

More puzzles:

# Ellipsoid surface area

How much difference does the earth’s equatorial bulge make in its surface area?

To first approximation, the earth is a sphere. The next step in sophistication is to model the earth as an ellipsoid.

The surface area of an ellipsoid with semi-axes abc is

where

and

The functions E and F are incomplete elliptic integrals

and

implemented in SciPy as ellipeinc and ellipkinc. Note that the SciPy functions take m as their second argument rather its square root k.

For the earth, a = b and so m = 1.

The following Python code computes the ratio of earth’s surface area as an ellipsoid to its area as a sphere.

from scipy import pi, sin, cos, arccos
from scipy.special import ellipkinc, ellipeinc

# values in meters based on GRS 80
# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRS_80

a = b = equatorial_radius

phi = arccos(c/a)
# in general, m = (a**2 * (b**2 - c**2)) / (b**2 * (a**2 - c**2))
m = 1

temp = ellipeinc(phi, m)*sin(phi)**2 + ellipkinc(phi, m)*cos(phi)**2
ellipsoid_area = 2*pi*(c**2 + a*b*temp/sin(phi))

# sphere with radius equal to average of polar and equatorial
r = 0.5*(a+c)
sphere_area = 4*pi*r**2

print(ellipsoid_area/sphere_area)


This shows that the ellipsoid model leads to 0.112% more surface area relative to a sphere.

Source: See equation 19.33.2 here.

Update: It was suggested in the comments that it would be better to compare the ellipsoid area to that of a sphere of the same volume. So instead of using the average of the polar and equatorial radii, one would take the geometric mean of the polar radius and two copies of the equatorial radius. Using that radius, the ellipsoid has 0.0002% more area than the sphere.

# Iterative linear solvers as metaphor

Gaussian elimination is systematic way to solve systems of linear equations in a finite number of steps. Iterative methods for solving linear systems require an infinite number of steps in theory, but may find solutions faster in practice.

Gaussian elimination tells you nothing about the final solution until it’s almost done. The first phase, factorization, takes O(n^3) steps, where n is the number of unknowns. This is followed by the back-substitution phase which takes O(n^2) steps. The factorization phase tells you nothing about the solution. The back-substitution phase starts filling in the components of the solution one at a time. In application n is often so large that the time required for back-substitution is negligible compared to factorization.

Iterative methods start by taking a guess at the final solution. In some contexts, this guess may be fairly good. For example, when solving differential equations, the solution from one time step gives a good initial guess at the solution for the next time step. Similarly, in sequential Bayesian analysis the posterior distribution mode doesn’t move much as each observation arrives. Iterative methods can take advantage of a good starting guess while methods like Gaussian elimination cannot.

Iterative methods take an initial guess and refine it to a better approximation to the solution. This sequence of approximations converges to the exact solution. In theory, Gaussian elimination produces an exact answer in a finite number of steps, but iterative methods never produce an exact solution after any finite number of steps. But in actual computation with finite precision arithmetic, no method, iterative or not, ever produces an exact answer. The question is not which method is exact but which method produces an acceptably accurate answer first. Often the iterative method wins.

Successful projects often work like iterative numerical methods. They start with an approximation solution and iteratively refine it. All along the way they provide a useful approximation to the final product. Even if, in theory, there is a more direct approach to a final product, the iterative approach may work better in practice.

Algorithms iterate toward a solution because that approach may reach a sufficiently accurate result sooner. That may apply to people, but more important for people is the psychological benefit of having something to show for yourself along the way. Also, iterative methods, whether for linear systems or human projects, are robust to changes in requirements because they are able to take advantage of progress made toward a slightly different goal.

Related post: Ten surprises from numerical linear algebra

# Multiple zeta

The Riemann zeta function, introduced by Leonard Euler, is defined by

where the sum is over all positive integers n.

Euler also introduced a multivariate generalization of the zeta function

where the sum is over all decreasing k-tuples of positive integers. This generalized zeta function satisfies the following beautiful identity:

The multivariate zeta function and identities such as the one above are important in number theory and are the subject of open conjectures.

Source