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Calculus of variations can be used to find the curve from a point (x_1,y_1) to a point (x_2,y_2) which, when revolved around the x-axis, yields a surface of smallest surface ...

Operations research is a vast branch of mathematics which encompasses many diverse areas of minimization and optimization. Thousands of books have been written worldwide on ...

Orthogonal polynomials are classes of polynomials {p_n(x)} defined over a range [a,b] that obey an orthogonality relation int_a^bw(x)p_m(x)p_n(x)dx=delta_(mn)c_n, (1) where ...

Percolation, the fundamental notion at the heart of percolation theory, is a difficult idea to define precisely though it is quite easy to describe qualitatively. From the ...

A perfect graph is a graph G such that for every induced subgraph of G, the clique number equals the chromatic number, i.e., omega(G)=chi(G). A graph that is not a perfect ...

A permutation cycle is a subset of a permutation whose elements trade places with one another. Permutations cycles are called "orbits" by Comtet (1974, p. 256). For example, ...

A short mnemonic for remembering the first seven decimal digits of pi is "How I wish I could calculate pi" (C. Heckman, pers. comm., Feb. 3, 2005). Eight digits are given by ...

A plane is a two-dimensional doubly ruled surface spanned by two linearly independent vectors. The generalization of the plane to higher dimensions is called a hyperplane. ...

A root of a polynomial P(z) is a number z_i such that P(z_i)=0. The fundamental theorem of algebra states that a polynomial P(z) of degree n has n roots, some of which may be ...

A prime number (or prime integer, often simply called a "prime" for short) is a positive integer p>1 that has no positive integer divisors other than 1 and p itself. More ...