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Mathematics
Mathematics is the body of knowledge centered on concepts such as quantity,
structure, space, and change, and also the academic discipline that studies
them. Benjamin Peirce called it "the science that draws necessary conclusions".
Other practitioners of mathematics maintain that mathematics is the science of
pattern, that mathematicians seek out patterns whether found in numbers, space,
science, computers, imaginary abstractions, or elsewhere. Mathematicians explore
such concepts, aiming to formulate new conjectures and establish their truth by
rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions.
Today, mathematics is used throughout the world in many fields, including
natural science, engineering, medicine, and the social sciences such as
economics. Applied mathematics, the application of mathematics to such fields,
inspires and makes use of new mathematical discoveries and sometimes leads to
the development of entirely new disciplines. Mathematicians also engage in pure
mathematics, or mathematics for its own sake, without having any application in
mind, although applications for what began as pure mathematics are often
discovered later.The word "mathematics"comes from the Greek μάθημα (máthēma),
which means learning, study, science, and additionally came to have the narrower
and more technical meaning "mathematical study", even in Classical times. Its
adjective is related to learning, or studious, which likewise further came to
mean mathematical. In particular, in Latin ars mathematica, meant the
mathematical art.
Mathematics has since been greatly extended, and there has been a fruitful
interaction between mathematics and science, to the benefit of both.
Mathematical discoveries have been made throughout history and continue to be
made today. According to Mikhail B. Sevryuk, in the January 2006 issue of the
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, "The number of papers and books
included in the Mathematical Reviews database since 1940 (the first year of
operation of MR) is now more than 1.9 million, and more than 75 thousand items
are added to the database each year. The overwhelming majority of works in this
ocean contain new mathematical theorems and their proofs.Mathematics arises
wherever there are difficult problems that involve quantity, structure, space,
or change. At first these were found in commerce, land measurement and later
astronomy; nowadays, all sciences suggest problems studied by mathematicians,
and many problems arise within mathematics itself. Newton was one of the
infinitesimal calculus inventors, Feynman invented the Feynman path integral
using a combination of reasoning and physical insight, and today's string theory
also inspires new mathematics. Some mathematics is only relevant in the area
that inspired it, and is applied to solve further problems in that area. But
often mathematics inspired by one area proves useful in many areas, and joins
the general stock of mathematical concepts. The remarkable fact that even the
"purest" mathematics often turns out to have practical applications is what
Eugene Wigner has called "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."
As in most areas of study, the explosion of knowledge in the scientific age has
led to specialization in mathematics. One major distinction is between pure
mathematics and applied mathematics. Several areas of applied mathematics have
merged with related traditions outside of mathematics and become disciplines in
their own right, including statistics, operations research, and computer
science.the major disciplines within mathematics first arose out of the need to
do calculations in commerce, to understand the relationships between numbers, to
measure land, and to predict astronomical events. These four needs can be
roughly related to the broad subdivision of mathematics into the study of
quantity, structure, space, and change (i.e., arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and
analysis). In addition to these main concerns, there are also subdivisions
dedicated to exploring links from the heart of mathematics to other fields: to
logic, to set theory (foundations), to the empirical mathematics of the various
sciences (applied mathematics), and more recently to the rigorous study of
uncertainty. Learn Mathematics, SCHOOLS Mathematics, COLLEGES Mathematics,
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