Questions tagged [intuition]
Questions asking for the intuition behind some definition, conjecture, proof etc. In other words, questions designed to improve or to acquire understanding on a conceptual or intuitive level, as opposed to on a technical or formal level. When asking such a question it can be helpful to include a rough description of ones understanding of the subject at hand (on a technical level).
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Twisting cochain intuition
I'm currently reading through Ed Brown's paper "Twisted tensor products, I", (MR105687, Zbl 0199.58201) and I couldn't find any simple examples of twisting cochains. I understand all ...
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The vertices of a triangle are three random points on a unit circle. The side lengths are, in random order, $a,b,c$. Show that $P(ab>c)=\frac12$
The vertices of a triangle are three unifomly random points on a unit circle. The side lengths are, in random order, $a,b,c$.
There is a convoluted proof that $P(ab>c)=\frac12$. But since the ...
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Densities, pseudoforms, absolute differential forms and measures, differential forms, etc
Apologies if this question is too basic, but I figured I first heard of most of these concepts on MO, so perhaps I can ask here.
Gelfand’s definition, copied from AlvarezPaiva [My edit, could be ...
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Daunting papers/books and how to finally read them
Most people throughout their career encounter at least one paper that seems especially daunting to them.
I'm interested in real stories of how you successfully overcame that to extract the knowledge ...
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How to think about Beilinson's gluing data?
Let $X$ be a complex manifold, $D$ a divisor (that is globally the zero locus of a function) and $U$ its complement. Recall Beilinson's "how to glue perverse sheaves":
Given a perverse ...
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Dévissage for a stratification in Grothendieck's Esquisse d’un programme: What is it?
I have a question about the the intuition of what Grothendieck proposed as tame topology in his "Esquisse d’un programme" as a "better suited" geometric structure in order to have ...
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Justification of modular law in allegories
The modular law in modular lattices can be described as an isomorphism between opposite edges of the square $(a \land b), a, b, (a\lor b)$. A fancier way of saying this is an adjoint equivalence with ...
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What heuristic arguments support Montgomery's conjecture for primes in short intervals?
I have a question regarding a conjecture due to H. L. Montgomery on the number of primes in short intervals. The conjecture apparently arises from probabilistic reasoning upon assuming the Riemann ...
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Meaning of a quantum field given by an operator-valued distribution
I am trying to grasp the basics of rigorous quantum field theory. Let me summise how the setup of non-interacting quantum field theories look like to me.
Let $\mathcal{H}$ be a Hilbert space in which ...
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What is Bernoulli umbra philosophically?
Well, Bernoulli umbra is an umbra whose moments are the Bernoulli numbers.
But what is it philosophically?
For instance, we can consider imaginary unit $i$
an umbra with moments $\{1,0,−1,0,1,\ldots\}$...
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Why does non-decreasing entropy imply actual convergence to that max entropy distribution?
Let $X_n$ be i.i.d with finite variance. Let $\bar X_n=\frac 1n \sum_{i=1}^nX_i$. It is a famous result that the continuous/differential entropy of the normalized average is non-decreasing. $$\mathrm ...
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What's the intuition for weighted limits?
I am reading Fosco's Coend Calculus and Emily Riehl's Categorical Homotopy Theory, Riehl's book motivates it in the following way,
Abstraction 1: Classical limits in terms of cones: Cones from an ...
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How rigorously can we apply the data supplied by this nonstandard attack on Kuratowski's closure-complement problem?
Suppose a student assigned an advanced version of Kuratowski’s closure-complement problem to solve—one that leaves out the standard hint about the finite upper bound of $14$—decides to look for the ...
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Is there any intuition of why the both, regularized logarithm of zero is $-\gamma$ and the regularized logarithm of Bernoulli umbra is $-\gamma$?
If we take the MacLaurin series for $\ln(x+1)$ and evaluate it at $x=-1$, we will get the Harmonic series with the opposite sign: $-\sum_{k=1}^\infty \frac1x$. Since the regularized sum of the ...
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Flat manifolds are local geometric objects
In an article called synthetic geometry in Riemannian manifolds M. Gromov says that
tori (and in general flat manifolds) must be seen as local geometric objects.
He does so after making an example ...
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