Author | Lloyd Rose |
---|---|
Series | Doctor Who book: Past Doctor Adventures |
Release number | 68 |
Subject | Featuring: Seventh Doctor Ace |
Set in | Period between Loving the Alien and Atom Bomb Blues |
Publisher | BBC Books |
Publication date | September 2004 |
Pages | 279 |
ISBN | 0-563-48621-X |
Preceded by | Synthespians™ |
Followed by | The Indestructible Man |
The Algebra of Ice is a BBC Books original novel written by Lloyd Rose and based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who . It features the Seventh Doctor and Ace.
The Doctor and Ace investigate a 'crop circle' in the Kentish countryside; they are helped by a maths expert, a web-magazine publish and the Doctor's friend, the Brigadier. However, this crop circle is made of ice and is not circular, instead being filled with square-sided shapes. It draws the Doctor and Ace into a new level of reality.
The story makes reference to the Riemann hypothesis, featuring a sequence set in a 'world' modelled on the Riemann zeta function.
In the part of mathematics referred to as topology, a surface is a two-dimensional manifold. Some surfaces arise as the boundaries of three-dimensional solid figures; for example, the sphere is the boundary of the solid ball. Other surfaces arise as graphs of functions of two variables; see the figure at right. However, surfaces can also be defined abstractly, without reference to any ambient space. For example, the Klein bottle is a surface that cannot be embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space.
Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann was a German mathematician who made profound contributions to analysis, number theory, and differential geometry. In the field of real analysis, he is mostly known for the first rigorous formulation of the integral, the Riemann integral, and his work on Fourier series. His contributions to complex analysis include most notably the introduction of Riemann surfaces, breaking new ground in a natural, geometric treatment of complex analysis. His 1859 paper on the prime-counting function, containing the original statement of the Riemann hypothesis, is regarded as a foundational paper of analytic number theory. Through his pioneering contributions to differential geometry, Riemann laid the foundations of the mathematics of general relativity. He is considered by many to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
In mathematics, particularly in complex analysis, a Riemann surface is a connected one-dimensional complex manifold. These surfaces were first studied by and are named after Bernhard Riemann. Riemann surfaces can be thought of as deformed versions of the complex plane: locally near every point they look like patches of the complex plane, but the global topology can be quite different. For example, they can look like a sphere or a torus or several sheets glued together.
The Riemann–Roch theorem is an important theorem in mathematics, specifically in complex analysis and algebraic geometry, for the computation of the dimension of the space of meromorphic functions with prescribed zeros and allowed poles. It relates the complex analysis of a connected compact Riemann surface with the surface's purely topological genus g, in a way that can be carried over into purely algebraic settings.
William Kingdon Clifford was an English mathematician and philosopher. Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, a special case of the Clifford algebra named in his honour. The operations of geometric algebra have the effect of mirroring, rotating, translating, and mapping the geometric objects that are being modelled to new positions. Clifford algebras in general and geometric algebra in particular have been of ever increasing importance to mathematical physics, geometry, and computing. Clifford was the first to suggest that gravitation might be a manifestation of an underlying geometry. In his philosophical writings he coined the expression mind-stuff.
In mathematics, analytic number theory is a branch of number theory that uses methods from mathematical analysis to solve problems about the integers. It is often said to have begun with Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet's 1837 introduction of Dirichlet L-functions to give the first proof of Dirichlet's theorem on arithmetic progressions. It is well known for its results on prime numbers and additive number theory.
In mathematics, a projective line is, roughly speaking, the extension of a usual line by a point called a point at infinity. The statement and the proof of many theorems of geometry are simplified by the resultant elimination of special cases; for example, two distinct projective lines in a projective plane meet in exactly one point.
In the mathematical field of complex analysis, a branch point of a multi-valued function is a point such that if the function is n-valued at that point, all of its neighborhoods contain a point that has more than n values. Multi-valued functions are rigorously studied using Riemann surfaces, and the formal definition of branch points employs this concept.
Nigel James Hitchin FRS is a British mathematician working in the fields of differential geometry, gauge theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. He is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an -dimensional manifold, or -manifold for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to an open subset of -dimensional Euclidean space.
Geometric function theory is the study of geometric properties of analytic functions. A fundamental result in the theory is the Riemann mapping theorem.
Mudumbai Seshachalu NarasimhanFRS was an Indian mathematician. His focus areas included number theory, algebraic geometry, representation theory, and partial differential equations. He was a pioneer in the study of moduli spaces of holomorphic vector bundles on projective varieties. His work is considered the foundation for Kobayashi–Hitchin correspondence that links differential geometry and algebraic geometry of vector bundles over complex manifolds. He was also known for his collaboration with mathematician C. S. Seshadri, for their proof of the Narasimhan–Seshadri theorem which proved the necessary conditions for stable vector bundles on a Riemann surface.
The study of manifolds combines many important areas of mathematics: it generalizes concepts such as curves and surfaces as well as ideas from linear algebra and topology. Certain special classes of manifolds also have additional algebraic structure; they may behave like groups, for instance. In that case, they are called Lie Groups. Alternatively, they may be described by polynomial equations, in which case they are called algebraic varieties, and if they additionally carry a group structure, they are called algebraic groups.
In mathematics, the term Riemann–Hilbert correspondence refers to the correspondence between regular singular flat connections on algebraic vector bundles and representations of the fundamental group, and more generally to one of several generalizations of this. The original setting appearing in Hilbert's twenty-first problem was for the Riemann sphere, where it was about the existence of systems of linear regular differential equations with prescribed monodromy representations. First the Riemann sphere may be replaced by an arbitrary Riemann surface and then, in higher dimensions, Riemann surfaces are replaced by complex manifolds of dimension > 1. There is a correspondence between certain systems of partial differential equations and possible monodromies of their solutions.
In mathematics, a Klein surface is a dianalytic manifold of complex dimension 1. Klein surfaces may have a boundary and need not be orientable. Klein surfaces generalize Riemann surfaces. While the latter are used to study algebraic curves over the complex numbers analytically, the former are used to study algebraic curves over the real numbers analytically. Klein surfaces were introduced by Felix Klein in 1882.
Combinatorial physics or physical combinatorics is the area of interaction between physics and combinatorics.
In mathematics, the Riemann sphere, named after Bernhard Riemann, is a model of the extended complex plane: the complex plane plus one point at infinity. This extended plane represents the extended complex numbers, that is, the complex numbers plus a value for infinity. With the Riemann model, the point is near to very large numbers, just as the point is near to very small numbers.