# Portal:Mathematics

## The Mathematics Portal

Mathematics is the study of representing and reasoning about abstract objects (such as numbers, points, spaces, sets, structures, and games). Mathematics is used throughout the world as an essential tool in many fields, including natural science, engineering, medicine, and the social sciences. Applied mathematics, the branch of mathematics concerned with application of mathematical knowledge to other fields, inspires and makes use of new mathematical discoveries and sometimes leads to the development of entirely new mathematical disciplines, such as statistics and game theory. Mathematicians also engage in pure mathematics, or mathematics for its own sake, without having any application in mind. There is no clear line separating pure and applied mathematics, and practical applications for what began as pure mathematics are often discovered. (Full article...)

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An animated geometric proof of the Pythagorean theorem, which states that among the three sides of a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, written as a2 + b2 = c2. A large square is formed with area c2, from four identical right triangles with sides a, b and c, fitted around a small central square (of side length ba). Then two rectangles are formed with sides a and b by moving the triangles. Combining the smaller square with these rectangles produces two squares of areas a2 and b2, which together must have the same area as the initial large square. This is a somewhat subtle example of a proof without words.

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## In the news

22 March 2023 –
Argentine mathematician Luis Caffarelli wins this year's Abel Prize "for his seminal contributions to regularity theory for nonlinear partial differential equations including free-boundary problems and the Monge–Ampère equation". He becomes the first Latin American to win this prize. (The Guardian)

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A Hilbert space is a real or complex vector space with a positive-definite Hermitian form, that is complete under its norm. Thus it is an inner product space, which means that it has notions of distance and of angle (especially the notion of orthogonality or perpendicularity). The completeness requirement ensures that for infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces the limits exist when expected, which facilitates various definitions from calculus. A typical example of a Hilbert space is the space of square summable sequences.

Hilbert spaces allow simple geometric concepts, like projection and change of basis to be applied to infinite dimensional spaces, such as function spaces. They provide a context with which to formalize and generalize the concepts of the Fourier series in terms of arbitrary orthogonal polynomials and of the Fourier transform, which are central concepts from functional analysis. Hilbert spaces are of crucial importance in the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. (Full article...)

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