Note: these posts are copied over from the ‘mathbucket’ section of my old tumblr blog and I haven’t put much effort into this, so there is likely to be context or formatting missing.
That education thing made me remember I wrote something about my maths teacher a few months ago as setup for a complex point that I never wrote down and have now completely forgotten. I’m probably not going to remember so let’s post it as is:
So I’m digging through some differential equation stuff trying to fill a few gaps in my knowledge, mostly arsing around ‘doing some prerequisites’ for quantum field theory instead of just jumping in. This time it’s the Fredholm Alternative. It looks like one of those bits of arcane mathematical methods textbook lore with the silly names, like the bilinear concomitant or Rayleigh’s quotient or ‘the method of undetermined coefficients’, which I always thought was just called ‘guessing’. This looks pretty useful and general though, looking at some inner product to see whether boundary value problems have one solution or no solutions or infinitely many solutions.
Actually it looks a bit like… oh, yeah, look, there’s even a matrix version. In fact,…
I’m in a classroom with the other Further Maths nerds. It doesn’t fit on the timetable so we’re stuck in there again after school, eating vending machine sweets and solving systems of simultaneous equations using Gaussian elimination. As always, our teacher has gone beyond the rote work of the syllabus and is making sure we understand what’s going on geometrically, using three planes as an example. We’re systematically working through the possibilities: all three planes parallel, two parallel and one crosses them (‘British Rail logo’), all three intersect along a single line, all the rest. We can end up with no solutions, or a unique solution at a single point, or a whole line or plane of solutions.
Then someone looks out the window. It’s someone’s brother in Year 8, mucking about on the flat roof across the playground. He thinks everyone’s gone home.
Our teacher opens the window, still caught up in his system of equations. “GET OFF THAT PLANE!!! NOW! YOU’RE IN DETENTION TOMORROW!”
And afterwards, as the kid complies: “…did I just say ‘plane’ instead of ‘roof’?”
We go back to the example. I get plenty more linear algebra next year at university, but however abstractly they dress it up, in my head it’s just the same old intersecting planes.
I’ve seen the words ‘Fredholm Alternative’ somewhere else, though, too, on one of my unmotivated afternoons in the library pulling books off the shelves. Ah yes, googling around it must have been Booss and Bleecker’s Index Theory, which aims to drag even applied mathematicians up to the heights:
Index Theory with Applications to Mathematics and Physics describes, explains, and explores the Index Theorem of Atiyah and Singer, one of the truly great accomplishments of twentieth-century mathematics whose influence continues to grow, fifty years after its discovery. The Index Theorem has given birth to many mathematical research areas and exposed profound connections between analysis, geometry, topology, algebra, and mathematical physics. Hardly any topic of modern mathematics stands independent of its influence.
And there’s the Fredholm Alternative in Chapter 2, one of the steps on the path.
Maybe I’m not just digging out random crap from the textbook. It looks like I accidentally found one of the Old Ways of mathematics, linking my A Level classes with some great confluence up in the stratosphere. With like a million steps above me still, but sometimes it’s nice just to know you’re on the path.
drossbucket 