Hyperbolic homogeneous polynomials, oh my!
Monday, April 21, 2014 - 08:32
in Mathematics & Economics
Cutting-edge mathematics today, at least to the uninitiated, often sounds as if it bears no relation to the arithmetic we all learned in grade school. What do topology and combinatorics and n-dimensional space have to do with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division? Yet there remains within mathematics one vibrant field of study that makes constant reference to basic arithmetic: number theory. Number theory—the "queen of mathematics," according to the famous 19th century mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss—takes integers as its starting point. Begin counting 1, 2, 3, and you enter the domain of number theory.