Examples of unexpected mathematical images

mathoverflow.net

188 points·mathgenius··10 comments

The Terry Tao was an awesome surprise

I have two questions

1) how important is Terry Tao and his group to compressed sensing?

2) I'm interested in signal processing and compressed sensing. How can I get into it with a math background instead of an EE background?

Edit sorry I posted this comment three times. I pushed the comment button on my phone and nothing happened so I assumed nothing happened

Terry Tao is the Erdos of this era - he was competing in the International Mathematics Olympiad when his peers were in middle school [1] and is now sort of the person to go to when your work has stalled [2]. It's ridiculous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao#Childhood [2] "If you're stuck on a problem, then one way out is to interest Terence Tao" - Charles Fefferman

If you're using the materialistic hacker app like I am then the flow is

- submit - send - close window

So if send takes forever you press the button again, which doesn't disable itself.

Good to know. I just visit the website but I'll check out that app

I can recommend the paper by David Donoho from 2014: https://statweb.stanford.edu/~donoho/Reports/2004/Compressed...

I'm going to make a claim: almost all mathematical "images" (2D graphical visualizations) are unexpected. This is because the set of expectations is most likely countable and the set of all mathematical images is not.

From the title I expected to see the Batman curve

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BatmanCurve.html

Donoho proposed basics pursuit 10 years before it was proved in his joint work with Terence Tao.

I am surprised that the Mandelbrot Set is not here.

a spectacularly unbiased example, multiple measurements, experimental and simulated, of the same thing :)

http://imgur.com/a/m2GRZ

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