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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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