Discrete Mathematics Quiz: Test Your Math Modeling Skills

Mathematics: Key Facts and Areas of Knowledge

Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes numbers, formulas, shapes, and quantities.
Mathematics is divided into four major subdisciplines: number theory, algebra, geometry, and analysis.
Most mathematical activity involves the discovery of properties of abstract objects and the use of pure reason to prove them.
Mathematics is essential in the natural sciences, engineering, medicine, finance, computer science, and the social sciences.
The fundamental truths of mathematics are independent from any scientific experimentation.
There are over 60 first-level areas of mathematics, as listed in the 2020 Mathematics Subject Classification.
Geometry is one of the oldest branches of mathematics, and it started with empirical recipes concerning shapes.
The ancient Greeks introduced the concept of proofs, which require that every assertion must be proved.
Algebra is the art of manipulating equations and formulas.
Algebra became an area in its own right with the introduction of the use of variables for representing unknown or unspecified numbers.
Calculus was introduced independently and simultaneously by 17th-century mathematicians Newton and Leibniz, and it is fundamentally the study of the relationship of variables that depend on each other.
There are several subareas of mathematics, including analytic number theory, algebraic number theory, geometry of numbers, diophantine equations, transcendence theory, synthetic geometry, analytic geometry, differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and modern algebra or abstract algebra.Overview of Mathematics: From Discrete Mathematics to Computational Mathematics
"Calculus" refers to the elementary part of mathematical theory, while "analysis" is used for advanced parts.
Analysis is divided into real analysis and complex analysis, with subareas shared by other areas of mathematics.
Discrete mathematics is the study of individual, countable mathematical objects and includes mathematical logic and set theory.
Mathematical logic and set theory were not considered mathematical objects until the end of the 19th century and led to the foundational crisis of mathematics.
Statistics is a mathematical application used for the collection and processing of data samples using procedures based on probability theory.
Computational mathematics studies problems that are typically too large for human numerical capacity, including numerical analysis and scientific computing.
The history of mathematics includes the development of numbers, arithmetic, algebra, and geometry in ancient Babylon and Egypt, and the emergence of Greek mathematics as a distinct discipline in the 6th century BC.
During the medieval period, Islamic mathematics developed algebra and made advances in spherical trigonometry and the decimal point.
The early modern period saw the development of calculus by Newton and Leibniz, and the unification of mathematical innovations by Euler.
Mathematics has a rich terminology and notation, with axioms, postulates, conjectures, theorems, and lemmas used to communicate rigorous arguments.
Mathematics is used in most sciences for modeling phenomena and making predictions, with accuracy depending on the adequacy of the mathematical model used.
There is a philosophical debate about whether mathematics is a science, but in practice, mathematicians are grouped with scientists and share many similarities with the physical sciences.Mathematics: Its Development, Relationship with Other Sciences, and Philosophical Debates
Mathematics in the West was initially motivated by the needs of technology and science, and there was no clear distinction between pure and applied mathematics.
In the 19th century, mathematicians increasingly focused on internal problems, leading to a split between pure and applied mathematics, although the lines between the two are frequently blurred.
The aftermath of World War II led to a surge in the development of applied mathematics, with many theories developed for applications found interesting from the point of view of pure mathematics.
The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is a phenomenon where many mathematical theories have applications outside their initial object, including in physics and other areas of mathematics.
Biology, chemistry, earth sciences, and social sciences all use mathematics, with probability, modeling, and statistical hypothesis testing being common tools.
The study of complex systems, such as unemployment or demographic evolution, uses elementary mathematical knowledge, but the choice of counting criteria or models can be subject to controversy.
Mathematics has had a close relationship with astrology for a long time, with renowned mathematicians also considered to be renowned astrologists in the past.
The connection between mathematics and material reality has led to philosophical debates, with a great many professional mathematicians taking no interest in a definition of mathematics or considering it undefinable.
Aristotle defined mathematics as "the science of quantity," but this definition became inadequate with the emergence of new areas of mathematics.
Mathematics requires rigor, with unambiguous definitions and proofs reducible to a succession of applications of inference rules without intuition or empirical evidence.
The rise of technology in the 20th century opened the way to a new science: computing, which is closely related to mathematics in several ways.
Theoretical computer science is essentially mathematical in nature, and the use of experimentation to discover mathematical insights has revolutionized traditional mathematics.