# Portal:Mathematics

## The Mathematics Portal

Mathematics is the study of numbers, quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematics is used throughout the world as an essential tool in many fields, including natural science, engineering, medicine, and the social sciences. Applied mathematics, the branch of mathematics concerned with application of mathematical knowledge to other fields, inspires and makes use of new mathematical discoveries and sometimes leads to the development of entirely new mathematical disciplines, such as statistics and game theory. Mathematicians also engage in pure mathematics, or mathematics for its own sake, without having any application in mind. There is no clear line separating pure and applied mathematics, and practical applications for what began as pure mathematics are often discovered.

There are approximately 31,444 mathematics articles in Wikipedia.

View new selections below (purge)

## Selected article

 The region between two loxodromes on a geometric sphere. Image credit: Karthik Narayanaswami

The Riemann sphere is a way of extending the plane of complex numbers with one additional point at infinity, in a way that makes expressions such as

${\displaystyle {\frac {1}{0}}=\infty }$

well-behaved and useful, at least in certain contexts. It is named after 19th century mathematician Bernhard Riemann. It is also called the complex projective line, denoted CP1.

On a purely algebraic level, the complex numbers with an extra infinity element constitute a number system known as the extended complex numbers. Arithmetic with infinity does not obey all of the usual rules of algebra, and so the extended complex numbers do not form a field. However, the Riemann sphere is geometrically and analytically well-behaved, even near infinity; it is a one-dimensional complex manifold, also called a Riemann surface.

In complex analysis, the Riemann sphere facilitates an elegant theory of meromorphic functions. The Riemann sphere is ubiquitous in projective geometry and algebraic geometry as a fundamental example of a complex manifold, projective space, and algebraic variety. It also finds utility in other disciplines that depend on analysis and geometry, such as quantum mechanics and other branches of physics.

## Selected picture

Credit: Cburnett

This logic diagram of a full adder shows how logic gates can be used in a digital circuit to add two binary inputs (i.e., two input bits), along with a carry-input bit (typically the result of a previous addition), resulting in a final "sum" bit and a carry-output bit. This particular circuit is implemented with two XOR gates, two AND gates and one OR gate, although equivalent circuits may be composed of only NAND gates or certain combinations of other gates. To illustrate its operation, consider the inputs A = 1 and B = 1 with Cin = 0; this means we are adding 1 and 1, and so should get the number 2. The output of the first XOR gate (upper-left) is 0, since the two inputs do not differ (1 XOR 1 = 0). The second XOR gate acts on this result and the carry-input bit, 0, resulting in S = 0 (0 XOR 0 = 0). Meanwhile, the first AND gate (in the middle) acts on the output of the first gate, 0, and the carry-input bit, 0, resulting in 0 (0 AND 0 = 0); and the second AND gate (immediately below the other one) acts on the two original input bits, 1 and 1, resulting in 1 (1 AND 1 = 1). Finally, the OR gate at the lower-right corner acts on the outputs of the two AND gates and results in the carry-output bit Cout = 1 (0 OR 1 = 1). This means the final answer is "0-carry-1", or "10", which is the binary representation of the number 2. Multiple-bit adders (i.e., circuits that can add inputs of 4-bit length, 8-bit length, or any other desired length) can be implemented by chaining together simpler 1-bit adders such as this one. Adders are examples of the kinds of simple digital circuits that are combined in sophisticated ways inside computer CPUs to perform all of the functions necessary to operate a digital computer. The fact that simple electronic switches could implement logical operations—and thus simple arithmetic, as shown here—was realized by Charles Sanders Peirce in 1886, building on the mathematical work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and George Boole, after whom Boolean algebra was named. The first modern electronic logic gates were produced in the 1920s, leading ultimately to the first digital, general-purpose (i.e., programmable) computers in the 1940s.

## Did you know...

Showing 7 items out of 72

## WikiProjects

The Mathematics WikiProject is the center for mathematics-related editing on Wikipedia. Join the discussion on the project's talk page.

Project pages

Essays

Subprojects

Related projects

## Index of mathematics articles

 ARTICLE INDEX: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z (0–9) MATHEMATICIANS: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

## In other Wikimedia projects

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

Wikibooks
Books

Commons
Media

Wikinews
News

Wikiquote
Quotations

Wikisource
Texts

Wikiversity
Learning resources

Wiktionary
Definitions

Wikidata
Database