It All Adds Up: The Story of People and Mathematics by Mickael Launay

Author:Mickael Launay
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Mathematics, Science, Arithmetic, Study & Teaching, History
ISBN: 9780008352554
Publisher: William Collins
Published: 2019-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

INVENTING YOUR OWN MATHEMATICAL THEORY

Have you ever dreamt of having a theorem to your name, like Pythagoras, Brahmagupta or al-Kashi? Great – I’ll now demonstrate how you can create and study your own algebraic structure. You will need two ingredients for this: a list of elements and an operation that lets you combine them.

Take, for example, eight elements denoted by the following symbols: ♥, ♦, ♣, ♠, ♪, ♫, ▲ and ☼. You will also need a sign for your operation, so take, for example, ✳ and call it a ‘Bombellification’ in homage to the Italian scholar. To determine the result of the Bombellification of two elements, you now need to set up a table for this operation. Draw a table of eight rows and eight columns corresponding to your eight elements and fill it as you see fit by putting one of the elements in each cell.

That’s it! Your theory is ready, all you have to do now is study it. Looking at the second row and the fourth column you can see, for example, that in Bombellifying ♦ by ♠, you obtain ☼. In other words, ♦ ✳ ♠=☼. You can even solve equations in your theory.

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