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...)
Featured articles –
Selected image –
Good articles –
Did you know (auto-generated) –
- ... that in 1940 Xu Ruiyun became the first Chinese woman to receive a PhD in mathematics?
- ... that Catechumen, a Christian first-person shooter, was funded only in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre?
- ... that according to one critic, the math rock album Cryptooology by Yowie "sounds like an explosion in a Slinky factory"?
- ... that despite published scholarship to the contrary, Andrew Planta neither received a doctorate nor taught mathematics at Erlangen?
- ... that museum director Alena Aladava rebuilt the Belarusian national art collection in the aftermath of the Second World War?
- ... that subgroup distortion theory, introduced by Misha Gromov in 1993, can help encode text?
- ... that after Archimedes first defined convex curves, mathematicians lost interest in their analysis until the 19th century, more than two millennia later?
- ... that the discovery of Descartes' theorem in geometry came from a too-difficult mathematics problem posed to a princess?
More did you know –
- ...that it is unknown whether π and e are algebraically independent?
- ...that a nonconvex polygon with three convex vertices is called a pseudotriangle?
- ...that it is possible for a three-dimensional figure to have a finite volume but infinite surface area, such as Gabriel's Horn?
- ... that as the dimension of a hypersphere tends to infinity, its "volume" (content) tends to 0?
- ...that the primality of a number can be determined using only a single division using Wilson's Theorem?
- ...that the line separating the numerator and denominator of a fraction is called a solidus if written as a diagonal line or a vinculum if written as a horizontal line?
- ...that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type the complete works of William Shakespeare?
Selected article –
The graph of a real-valued quadratic function of a real variable x, is a parabola. Image credit: Enoch Lau |
A quadratic equation is a polynomial equation of degree two. The general form is
where a ≠ 0 (if a = 0, then the equation becomes a linear equation). The letters a, b, and c are called coefficients: the quadratic coefficient a is the coefficient of x2, the linear coefficient b is the coefficient of x, and c is the constant coefficient, also called the free term.
Quadratic equations are known by that name because quadratus is Latin for "square"; in the leading term the variable is squared.
A quadratic equation has two (not necessarily distinct) solutions, which may be real or complex, given by the quadratic formula:
If the discriminant , then the quadratic equation has two distinct real solutions; if , the equation has two real solutions which are equal; if , the equation has two complex solutions.
These solutions are roots of the corresponding quadratic function
View all selected articles |
Subcategories
Algebra | Arithmetic | Analysis | Complex analysis | Applied mathematics | Calculus | Category theory | Chaos theory | Combinatorics | Dynamical systems | Fractals | Game theory | Geometry | Algebraic geometry | Graph theory | Group theory | Linear algebra | Mathematical logic | Model theory | Multi-dimensional geometry | Number theory | Numerical analysis | Optimization | Order theory | Probability and statistics | Set theory | Statistics | Topology | Algebraic topology | Trigonometry | Linear programming
Mathematics | History of mathematics | Mathematicians | Awards | Education | Literature | Notation | Organizations | Theorems | Proofs | Unsolved problems
Topics in mathematics
General | Foundations | Number theory | Discrete mathematics |
---|---|---|---|
| |||
Algebra | Analysis | Geometry and topology | Applied mathematics |
Index of mathematics articles
ARTICLE INDEX: | |
MATHEMATICIANS: |
Related portals
WikiProjects
The Mathematics WikiProject is the center for mathematics-related editing on Wikipedia. Join the discussion on the project's talk page.
Project pages Essays Subprojects Related projects
|
Things you can do
|
In other Wikimedia projects
The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:
-
Commons
Free media repository -
Wikibooks
Free textbooks and manuals -
Wikidata
Free knowledge base -
Wikinews
Free-content news -
Wikiquote
Collection of quotations -
Wikisource
Free-content library -
Wikiversity
Free learning tools -
Wiktionary
Dictionary and thesaurus