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Re: [ProgSoc] Programming! Code!
On Tuesday 17 October 2006 00:09, Christian Kent wrote:
> (I've come to hate the way all maths-topic pages on Wikipedia seem to
> be immune from the easy-to-read style pervasive on the rest of the
> site).
I once made a contribution to wikipedia on Riemann Surfaces [1]. I'd
been struggling to understand them, and someone had explained them to
me in "Layman's Terms". So, I took their explanation, I created an
account, I logged in, and right down the bottom of the page I added a
section In Layman's Terms, with a brief blurb regarding how to conceive
the Riemann Sphere [2] (as it had been explained to me, which turned
out not to be quite right... :P)
Anyway... notwithstanding the fact that my explanation was slightly
erroneous (it was *relatively* correct! ("I always do that. I always
mess up some mundane detail")), it got deleted almost straight away by
some dude who said something about as useful as "the page already
contains a link to holomorphic functions" (i.e. if you start navigating
through all human knowledge you will eventually stumble across the
meaning of the Riemann Sphere).
I did eventually stumble across a good explanation of the Riemann
Sphere... it was either in Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea [3]
or Imagining Numbers (particularly the square-root of minus fifteen)
[4], both excellent books if your looking for clear explanation of
mathematics and some of its troubles.
The Riemann Sphere conquers the infinity of the complex plane... it
wraps it up into a nice little unit sphere. :)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_surfaces
[2] http://www.jj5.net/file/2005-03-30-180852/2005-03-30-174423.gif
[3] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0140296476/
[4] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0141008873/
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