The symmetry that makes solving math equations easy
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
[0] To be far, I'm not actually positive that the 2 body problem in GR is actually computationally harder than massive polynomials, but there is no exact solution to it; and understanding the approximation is definitely harder.
We do, it's just that we choose different formulations for problems which require such solutions, or straight up don't solve them.
Think about the unsolvable n-body problem from classical mechanics. An equivalent of that problem exists in most scientific disciplines. We just choose not to think of those problems from the polynomial solving angle.
Read the news lately?
Your previous assumption reads more like math being able to model it, but scientists preferring elegant, aesthetic and simplistic solutions.
Looking at my PhD physics neighbor in student housing a few years back, it doesn't seem true though. He was juggling multi-page equations for his quantum field theory thesis.
In control engineering it's more true though. I remember one of my professors say that many people only use linear controls because there they can "prove" the stability of the system. In contrast to the nonlinear, i.e. everything else, control theory where such proofs were harder to get by.
However, he continued, proving the stability of a linear controller interacting with a linearized system could never "prove" the system's stability as a whole.
This seems more a limitation of what (human) mathematicians are able to model, rather than something fundamental in math itself. Perhaps in a few centuries we will have invented mathematical tools that allow the mind to grasp nonlinear systems better, similar to how the invention of better construction tooling has enabled the construction of ever larger buildings.
I desperately wish students got more practice with function transformations. It's a powerful tool that far too many students leave high school without understanding.
I believe that's what they mean for quintics. It's been a while for me apologies if I'm miss remembering here.
- A square root’s result is always nonnegative (or in the complex case, has nonnegative real part) and unique, whereas the quadratic equation has two solutions.
- You can manipulate the root function symbolically much better than the roots of an equation. sqrt(2)^2 is 2, but figuring out that `solution(x^2-2=0)^2` reduces to the same number is much less obvious, and even more so for more complicated roots.
I don’t know what definition you’re using, but if we take the square root of Y to be a number X such that X*X = Y, then the above statement isn’t true.
I just had one problem in reading it - the somewhat inconsistent use of fonts - often in the same line was not pleasant. The numeric zero ('0') in particular looks like character 'oh' ('o').
Here's a long quote from "LOVE and MATH" that gives a taste of the book:
"The story of Galois is one of the most romantic and fascinating stories about mathematicians ever told. A child prodigy, he made groundbreaking discoveries very young. And then he died in a duel at the age of twenty. There are different views on what was the reason for the duel, which happened on May 31, 1832: some say there was a woman involved, and some say it was because of his political activities. Certainly, Galois was uncompromising in expressing his political views, and he managed to upset many people during his short life.
It was literally on the eve of his death that, writing frantically in a candlelit room in the middle of the night, he completed his manuscript outlining his ideas about symmetries of numbers. It was in essence his love letter to humanity in which he shared with us the dazzling discoveries he had made. Indeed, the symmetry groups Galois discovered, which now carry his name, are the wonders of our world, like the Egyptian pyramids or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The difference is that we don’t have to travel to another continent or through time to find them. They are right at our fingertips, wherever we are. And it’s not just their beauty that is captivating; so is their high potency for real-world applications.
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What Galois had done was bring the idea of symmetry, intuitively familiar to us in geometry, to the forefront of number theory. What’s more, he showed symmetry’s amazing power.
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The general formula for the solutions of the quadratic equations was already known to the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi in the ninth century (the word “algebra” originated from the word “al-jabr,” which appears in the title of his book). Formulas for solutions of the cubic and quartic (degree 4) equations were discovered in the first half of the sixteenth century. Naturally, the next target was a quintic equation (of degree 5). Prior to Galois, many mathematicians had been desperately trying to find a formula for its solutions for almost 300 years, to no avail. But Galois realized that they had been asking the wrong question. Instead, he said, we should focus on the group of symmetries of the number field obtained by adjoining the solutions of this equation to the rational numbers – this is what we now call the Galois group.
The question of describing the Galois group turns out to be much more tractable than the question of writing an explicit formula for the solutions. One can say something meaningful about this group even without knowing what the solutions are. And from this one can then infer important information about the solutions. In fact, Galois was able to show that a formula for solutions in terms of radicals (that is, square roots, cubic roots, and so on) exists if and only if the corresponding Galois group has a particularly simple structure: is what mathematicians now call a solvable group. For quadratic, cubic, and quartic equations, the Galois groups are always solvable. That’s why solutions of these equations may be written in terms of the radicals. But Galois showed that the group of symmetries of a typical quintic equation (or an equation of a higher degree) is not solvable. This immediately implies that there is no formula for solutions of these equations in terms of radicals.
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Galois’ work is a great example of the power of a mathematical insight. Galois did not solve the problem of finding a formula for solutions of polynomial equations in the sense in which it was understood. He hacked the problem! He reformulated it, bent and warped it, looked at it in a totally different light. And his brilliant insight has forever changed the way people think about numbers and equations.
Also, if one wanted to extend this article a little, ask it about the role quadratic equations with complex roots played Gauss's derivation of the fundamental theorem of algebra. Here's the core of the output:
> "Suppose we have a quadratic equation with complex roots. The roots of the equation are given by the formula:
x = (-b ± sqrt(b^2 - 4ac))/2a
> "If b^2 - 4ac is negative, then the roots of the equation are complex numbers. Gauss recognized that the complex roots of a quadratic equation come in conjugate pairs. That is, if one root is a + bi, then the other root is a - bi, where a and b are real numbers."
> "Gauss used this fact to show that any polynomial equation with complex coefficients can be factored into linear factors with complex roots. He did this by taking pairs of complex conjugate roots and combining them into quadratic factors. Then he repeated this process until all the roots had been combined into linear factors."
Numberphile has a video on this and the rest of Gauss's proof:
Is it really cheating when it's just using another tool in the box? People should learn to do more with everything at their disposal, not arbitrarily limit themselves. Should I not use a 3D printer because I ought to sculpt by hand? Must I not use a regular printer because I should write and draw everything with a pencil?
This is why black boxes are deprecated in schooling, until the point comes when we believe the students understand enough to be able to verify truth or falsity, at which point we let them use black boxes so that they can learn more. But still, when they are using those black boxes to learn more, we're keeping them from using a black box of the "more". Again, in the hopes that they'll understand the "more" enough to be able to verify the truth or falsity of the results of that "more". Once they can do this, they've hopefully graduated, and are free to use a black box of the "more".
Use black boxes from the get-go and no one realizes that soylent green is people. Or that the Morlocks feed on the Eloi.
The point of solving these exercises is for you to train yourself in manipulating functions, maybe so that you can later do it in more complex and novel situations where neither ChatGPT nor WolframAlpha will find the solution for you (or worse, give you a wrong answer). It doesn't mean they are useless tools, actual scientists and engineers use them, but because they actually solved the exercises when they learned to do maths, they are able to recognize when they fail and adjust their queries to have they do what they need.
And while the "you won't always have a calculator with you" is mostly wrong nowadays. And it also was before smartphones since pocket calculators were extremely cheap and small so you could always have one on you if you wanted to, and they were actually more reliable than smartphones. What is important is not to put your entire trust into the calculator. You have to recognize that if you calculator tells you that $42 + 10% is $63, you messed up somewhere. It is the same with ChatGPT, it can help you, but if you don't know your subject, you won't be able to differentiate between helpful answers and hallucinations, making it worse than useless.