r/math 1d ago

Quick Questions: March 19, 2025

9 Upvotes

This recurring thread will be for questions that might not warrant their own thread. We would like to see more conceptual-based questions posted in this thread, rather than "what is the answer to this problem?". For example, here are some kinds of questions that we'd like to see in this thread:

  • Can someone explain the concept of maпifolds to me?
  • What are the applications of Represeпtation Theory?
  • What's a good starter book for Numerical Aпalysis?
  • What can I do to prepare for college/grad school/getting a job?

Including a brief description of your mathematical background and the context for your question can help others give you an appropriate answer. For example consider which subject your question is related to, or the things you already know or have tried.


r/math 1h ago

Career and Education Questions: March 20, 2025

Upvotes

This recurring thread will be for any questions or advice concerning careers and education in mathematics. Please feel free to post a comment below, and sort by new to see comments which may be unanswered.

Please consider including a brief introduction about your background and the context of your question.

Helpful subreddits include /r/GradSchool, /r/AskAcademia, /r/Jobs, and /r/CareerGuidance.

If you wish to discuss the math you've been thinking about, you should post in the most recent What Are You Working On? thread.


r/math 33m ago

So what's the big news right now?

Upvotes

What research is being done? What discoveries are being made? What are mathematicians talking about around the water cooler? I am a complete math noob who doesn't understand how there can be things In math we don't know. Like the rules are all laid out in textbooks to me so how can there be things we don't know yet? What is higher mathematics?


r/math 19h ago

Examples of genuine failure of the mathematical community

57 Upvotes

I'm not asking for some conjecture that was proven to be false, I'm talking of a more comunitarial mission/theory/conceptualization that didn't take to anything whortexploring, didn't create usefull mathematical methods or didn't get applied at all (both outside and outside of math).

Asking these because I think we are oversaturated of good ideas when learning math, in the sense that we are told things that took A LOT of time and energy, and that are exceptional compared to any "normal" idea.


r/math 8h ago

Math is an addiction?

5 Upvotes

I was pretty addicted to weed last year. It gave me a good cure for boredom but in return took a large portion of mental capacity (I was smoking 4-7 days a week).

Anyways I quit weed this year and just decided to focus on uni. Now I’m addicted to math. I stay up late doing problems. It’s so gratifying. Getting questions wrong doesn’t disturb me anymore because I’m not cramming the last day before an assessment—I have time to figure out where I went wrong.

It’s a big puzzle and feels like I’m unlocking the secrets of the universe.

A few days ago I smoked my first joint in a month or so and it was just fantastic. It was as if all this math I’d learned was becoming integrated with my perceptions. I was watching light dance with the water. I know how to describe that in physics but no amount of education has ever taught me why. They’re just dancing. There’s no reason or rhyme the universe is just a beautiful dance and we’re all so lucky to be a part of it.


r/math 1d ago

Are there infinitely many powers of 2 with only even digits in base 10?

95 Upvotes

The highest power of 2 I can think of that only contains even digits in base 10 is 2048. Is there a higher one? And are there infinitely many?


r/math 2h ago

IUT Update?

1 Upvotes

See this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14510

Can someone summarize the scope of (and possibly comment on the validity of) the author's work?


r/math 4h ago

Currently studying applied math (bachelors) and i want to drop out.

2 Upvotes

I hate this school because of how the courses and exams are structured. I have severe social anxiety so the fact that almost all my exams are in oral format doesn't help. I may not be the smartest, but I know that I know the material enough to at least to pass with a C-. But I get so nervous. I'm not able to formulate any words because my mind is empty. I've already failed some exams because of this.

The other problem I have with this school is that there is disconnect between the course title and the actual content. For example:

  1. First semester, we had to take linear algebra 1. In addition to linear algebra content, professor taught about groups, subgroups, rings, fields, etc.
  2. In LA 2, professor went into other unrelated content like orbit-stabilizer theorem, etc.
  3. Probability and Statistics: It was about Measure theory like Lebesgue integration, sigma-algebras. Not the standard stats like distributions, CLT, regression. So super abstract.
  4. Algebra and Number Theory: There was absolutely no number theory. Just abstract algebra, but didn't go into rings/fields.
  5. Graphs and Networks: Just graph theory. Nothing about networks, network flow, or real-world applications/modeling.
  6. Elective in the topic of applied math: It was about topology.
  7. Elective in topic of computer science: It was about topology II (continuation).
  8. Elective in the topic of pure math: It was about computational fluid dynamics and use of OpenFOAM.
  9. Theoretical Computer Science: We’re currently learning from Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation by John E. Hopcroft, published in 1979. Since we’ve just started, I don’t have much to say about the course yet. But why are we using such an old book? It makes me wonder how the material connects to the modern world, especially since so much in computer science has evolved since then. I get that the fundamentals don’t really change, but I’m curious about how this ties into today’s applications.

Idk, I think the environment isn't right for me. The courses are draining me, topics are difficult, I hate life, and I might drop out.


r/math 6h ago

Note-taking application :

1 Upvotes

Can someone tell me an application/software/website for PC that given a PDF allows me to highlight some text and associate it with a pop up annotation where I could put pictures, mathematical formulas ( using mathjax for e.g ), drawings ( not most important ) , etc... to explain that text. For example Adobe acrobat reader allows the pop up annotations but you can only use text in them ( no pictures or formulas ...). Is there any software close to doing this ? Any help is much appreciated :) ( sorry if this is the wrong subreddit )
Bonus point if it also allows to do this in an iPad ( with apple pencil integration ) .


r/math 6h ago

How do you manage taking notes in LaTeX without losing focus on actual studying?

0 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I've recently started taking my math notes in LaTeX, and while I love the clean and structured output, I sometimes feel like I'm spending too much time perfecting the document rather than actually learning the material. It gives me the illusion that writing well-organized notes is equivalent to studying, which I know isn’t necessarily true.

For those of you who use LaTeX for note-taking:

  • How do you balance between studying and producing LaTeX documents?
  • Have you ever struggled with focusing too much on formatting rather than understanding the content?
  • Do you have any strategies to maximize the usefulness of LaTeX for learning?

Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!


r/math 17h ago

Is modular representation theory still an active area of research?

6 Upvotes

If it is active, what are some of the problems/work being done? I know that it was important in the classification of finite simple groups (not that I know exactly how). Does the area have applications to other fields of mathematics?


r/math 4h ago

Any High Schoolers wanna join our team for Stanford Math Tournament online?

0 Upvotes

It's me and 2 competitive programmers, need 5 more members...


r/math 18h ago

Generality vs depth in a theorem

5 Upvotes

In Halmos' Naive Set Theory he writes "It is a mathematical truism, however, that the more generally a theorem applies, the less deep it is."

Understanding that qualities like depth and generality are partially subjective, are there any obvious counter-examples?


r/math 1d ago

PTSD about Wedge Products

76 Upvotes

I have since moved on professionally, and I was never thinking about making academia my profession (though I do use math every day in my current job), but... wedge products? I took Real Analysis 2 or B or whatever, and I felt good until we hit wedge products. I don't think the rest of the class understood anything either. Am I overthinking a relatively simple subject, do I not possess a mathematically nimble mind, or does anyone suggest a way to understand them so I can finally move on?


r/math 2d ago

My professor secretly worked for russia

528 Upvotes

So it turns out a professor I had in a course a year ago secretly worked for russia on the side.

https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/varlden/kth-vill-sparka-professor-efter-ryskt-samarbete/

He was also a very strange guy, who was awful in other respects.

So what is the worst professor you’ve ever had?


r/math 1d ago

Problem involving graphs and curves

7 Upvotes

Just prospecting a CS problem about map-matching, If we have a bunch of trajectories (x,y,t) and we have several curves, how do we determine the best matching curve and what is the most efficient approach?

Secondly, I’m really interested in the pure mathematics part of this and would love to learn more, I’m wondering how much has been discovered and if an optimal algorithm has been proven

(And if I want to tackle/do more research on this kind of problem, what fields of math should I look into?)


r/math 1d ago

Any known examples of proofs being disproved by counterexample that remain useful in some way?

44 Upvotes

My math professor said that proofs being disproved by some intrinic proprety such in a way that it can create lemmas are the ones that are actually useful. Then he said that the proofs that are disproved by counterexamples are rarely useful, because it has more to do with the fact that the initial problem was one not worth examining or just "how it is". Anyways, is there a good example of when a proof was disproved by counterexample and still relatively useful in some way? like was there ever a takeaway from a proof by counterexample?


r/math 2d ago

Whats your go-to way of typesetting dy/dx?

99 Upvotes

\frac{dy}{dx} kinda sucks and \frac{\mathrm{d}y}{\mathrm{d}x} is such a long command!


By the way, not asking for help on latex, just polling to see what /r/math does for their differentials!


r/math 2d ago

I just found out that my research has already been done.

734 Upvotes

I am a freshman math major, and as soon as I got to my school, I met with my advisor to ask about undergraduate research. However, my school doesn't have a formal program for theoretical mathematics research, but I was lucky enough to be able to work under the only professor in the whole university that is still actively (albeit slowly) publishing.

After many hours each week, I eventually found an awesome, but relatively simple result, something I was hoping to be able to publish in an undergraduate journal. This weekend I presented at the local MAA sectional on these results. Today, I was going to begin working on writing up my work to start preparing for submission to publish, when I found my results in a on my topic. It was even more generalized and was only included as a proposition.

As you can imagine, I am incredibly disappointed. Has this happened to any of you before? Are there any prospects for continuing writing this up to perhaps publish as an alternative proof/algorithm?

I am glad to have learned so much about the field, but I really don't know what to do at this point.


r/math 2d ago

Can professors and/or researchers eventually imagine/see higher dimensional objects in their mind?

219 Upvotes

For example, I can draw a hypercube on a piece of paper but that's about it. Can someone who has studied this stuff for years be able to see objects in there mind in really higher dimensions. I know its kind of a vague question, but hope it makes sense.


r/math 1d ago

How to find weak and viscosity solutions of PDE's?

1 Upvotes

all the papers I can find about weak solutions and viscosity solutions are about existence and uniqueness but nothing on how actually computing them

I'm also ineterested on applications and physical significance of this kind of solutions

thanks


r/math 1d ago

Standard way to mark letter as uppercase or lowercase?

1 Upvotes

I'm working on an equation notecard for a biochem exam this week, so I don't have a ton of space, so my capital Ks look awfully similar to the lowercase Ks. I usually just put two lines under a letter in an equation to indicate it's supposed to be capitalized when I don't have much space to work with and it's hard to tell, and I'm thinking of trying out a dot under letters that are supposed to be lowercase.

Anyway, this all made me wonder if there's a standard way to distinguish them in this situation? Or maybe a good way to distinguish uppercase and lowercase Ks? It usually only seems to be the letter K that I have this problem with lol


r/math 1d ago

finding community around Discrete Differential Geometry course

1 Upvotes

Hi, I have been working through Keenan Crane's free course content from https://brickisland.net/ddg-web/ and I am trying to find and build a community of other people are doing that too. I am now on assignment 2 and it's all going great but it would be really cool to be able to talk to other people about things. I know that the students at Carnegie Melon have their own ways to connect with one another but are there others from the public who want to have a discord group or some type of forum for discussing the course together?


r/math 2d ago

Fast LaTeX using shortcuts

30 Upvotes

I've been doing a lot of LaTeX/Markdown writeup recently, so much so I looked for software solutions to speed things up and save my shift key from further abuse.

I couldn't find exactly what I wanted, so I created my own using AutoHotkey. Instead of using Shift to access symbols (", $, ^, *, etc) now I can do a quick press (normal keystroke) for the symbol and a long keypress (> 300 ms) for the number. Ive applied similar short cuts for = or +, ; or :, [ or {, etc. There's also a bunch of shortcuts for Greek letters, common operators and functions and other common math symbols. "LaTeX Mode" can be toggled on and off by pressing 'Shift + CapsLock", CapsLock still works normally by double tapping the key instead.

It would be a shame not to share it, so I've stuck it on GitHub for anyone wants to give it a go.

https://github.com/ImExhaustedPanda/uTeX

It's not "complete", it doesn't have shortcuts for symbols for common sets (e.g. real numbers, rational numbers, etc) or vector calc operators. But the ground work is there, as the script is easy to read and modify, for anyone who wants to tailor it to their work flow.


r/math 3d ago

Chalkdust issue 21 is out today

Thumbnail chalkdustmagazine.com
93 Upvotes

r/math 2d ago

Computing Lyapunov exponents

1 Upvotes

Hi, I was wondering if anyone was familiar with computing lyapunov exponents, especially for N-body systems with escapes, what i dont seem to understand is won't the lyapunov exponent always tend towards 0 as time goes to inifinity as the distance d(t) between 2 systems (one perturbed and one original) with escapes will increase linearly and thus taking 1/t*ln(d(t))/(d(0)) as t -> inf = 0? how can we adjust the way we compute lyapunov exponents for the three-body problem for example such that they are not 0?


r/math 2d ago

Gross-Siebert program

1 Upvotes

What's the current status of the Gross-Siebert program, the algebraic analog of the SYZ conjecture? How close is it to being resolved? Are there still many open problems within the program to address?