Most scientific & mathematical disciplines I know of have results that educated outsiders can appreciate and go "wow" after a brief acquaintance, even without understanding the details. Does anyone know of such a result for category theory?
-
Show this thread
-
Replying to @michael_nielsen
I've been searching for such a thing for a long time, and it's nice to see the responses here. But I'd ask for something similar for Group Theory. What is your "Brief, nice thing that makes people go Wow!" for Group Theory?
5 replies 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @ColinTheMathmo
I'm not a group theorist, nor a mathematician, so I'm the wrong person to ask. I do find the Solovay-Kitaev thm wonderful: informally, if you take products of elements in (many) compact Lie groups, they fill in the group exponentially quickly, & surprisingly near to uniformly
2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @michael_nielsen @ColinTheMathmo
A picture is better to explain what this means. And probably best explained concretely using, e.g., rotations and a few similar examples.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @michael_nielsen @ColinTheMathmo
I don't quite understand it well enough to make the attempt, but I'll bet there's a mindblowing 5-minute explanation of what Gromov's theorem on groups of polynomial growth says.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @michael_nielsen
Hmm. I'll have to think about that. I certainly don't know enough to be able to see immediately how or why that's interesting, so I'd have to dig into it. One result I did use to impress some 16 year olds was that in a group of even order there is an element a with a^2 = 1.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @ColinTheMathmo @michael_nielsen
That's in a completely different league, but it served to show them something that without group theory wasn't obvious, but with group theory was completely obvious. That hinted at the power of the topic, but took about 2 minutes from nothing.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @ColinTheMathmo @michael_nielsen
The things you're talking about would not be accessible to the youngsters I deal with, so I'm looking for something they wouldn't be able to show, but which becomes obvious with just basic group theory.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @ColinTheMathmo
It's not quite that level, but Fermat's little theorem of course follows from Lagrange's theorem. I'll bet you could do an amazing elementary video that was Euclid's algorithm, Fermat's little theorem, Lagrange's theorem, and Pratt's theorem (!), all in about 15 minutes!
2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
If you haven't seen it, Pratt's theorem is an amazing result about primes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primality_certificate … Easy to prove once you know Fermat's little theorem.
-
-
Replying to @michael_nielsen @ColinTheMathmo
It's kind of remarkable: you can start from the question "What does it take to prove a number is prime?", and quickly end up being almost forced to reinvent Lagrange's theorem (and groups and cosets) and Euclid's algorithm and Fermat's little theorem.
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes - 1 more reply
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.