• 0 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • Which is really a roundabout way of saying a tensor is a multilinear relationship between arbitrary products of vectors and covectors. They’re inherently geometric objects that don’t depend on a choice of coordinate system. The box of numbers is just one way of looking at a tensor, like a matrix is to a linear transformation on a vector space



    1. I also have a masters in math and completed all coursework for a PhD. Infinitesimals never came up because they’re not part of standard foundations for analysis. I’d be shocked if they were addressed in any formal capacity in your curriculum, because why would they be? It can be useful to think in terms of infinitesimals for intuition but you should know the difference between intuition and formalism.

    2. I didn’t say “infinitesimals don’t have a consistent algebra.” I’m familiar with NSA and other systems admitting infinitesimal-like objects. I said they’re not standard. They aren’t.

    3. If you want to use differential forms to define 1D calculus, rather than a NSA/infinitesimal approach, you’ll eventually realize some of your definitions are circular, since differential forms themselves are defined with an implicit understanding of basic calculus. You can get around this circular dependence but only by introducing new definitions that are ultimately less elegant than the standard limit-based ones.


  • Ok, but no. Infinitesimal-based foundations for calculus aren’t standard and if you try to make this work with differential forms you’ll get a convoluted mess that is far less elegant than the actual definitions. It’s just not founded on actual math. It’s hard for me to argue this with you because it comes down to simply not knowing the definition of a basic concept or having the necessary context to understand why that definition is used instead of others…





  • Kogasa@programming.devtoScience Memes@mander.xyzManifolds
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    Manifolds and differential forms are foundational concepts of differential topology, and connections are a foundational concept of differential geometry. They are mathematical building blocks used in modern physics, essentially enabling the transfer of multivariable calculus to arbitrary curved surfaces (without relying on an explicit embedding into Euclidean space). I think the joke is that physics students don’t typically learn the details of these building blocks, rather just the relevant results, and get confused when they’re emphasized.

    For a tl;dr about the concepts mentioned:

    • A manifold is a curve, surface, or higher-dimensional object which locally resembles Euclidean space around each point (e.g. the surface of a sphere is a 2D manifold; tiny person standing on a big sphere perceives the area around them to resemble a flat 2D plane).

    • Differential forms are “things that can be integrated over a manifold of the corresponding dimension.” In ordinary calculus of 1 variable, that’s a suitably regular function (e.g. a continuous function), and we view such a function f(x) as a differential form by writing it as “f(x) dx.”

    • A connection is a way of translating local tangent vectors from one point on a manifold to another in a parallel manner, i.e. literally connecting the local geometries of different points on the manifold. The existence of a connection on a manifold enables one to reason consistently about geometric concepts on the whole manifold.









  • Kogasa@programming.devtoMemes@lemmy.mlMath
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Stokes’ theorem. Almost the same thing as the high school one. It generalizes the fundamental theorem of calculus to arbitrary smooth manifolds. In the case that M is the interval [a, x] and ω is the differential 1-form f(t)dt on M, one has dω = f’(t)dt and ∂M is the oriented tuple {+x, -a}. Integrating f(t)dt over a finite set of oriented points is the same as evaluating at each point and summing, with negatively-oriented points getting a negative sign. Then Stokes’ theorem as written says that f(x) - f(a) = integral from a to x of f’(t) dt.


  • Kogasa@programming.devtoScience Memes@mander.xyzKnow who is king
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Only if you’re trying to get a numerical point evaluation. For example, one can use Fourier series to represent complex signals in terms of sine waves, and then reproduce the sine waves with hardware to reproduce the original signal. This is how a simple synthesizer produces different kinds of tones.


  • Nullable reference types are (a completely mandatory) bandaid fix in my opinion as a .net dev. You will encounter lots of edge cases where the compiler is unable to determine the nullability of an object, e.g. when using dependency injection to populate a field, or when using other unusual control flows like MediatR. You can suppress the warnings manually at the slight risk of lying to the analyzer. Objects supplied by external library code may or may not be annotated, and they may or may not be annotated correctly. The lack of compile-time null checking is occasionally an issue. But that said, NRT makes nullability a significantly smaller issue in C# than it used to be