Lyssia

(Apologies in advance if this isn't of much help - today's been exhausting ) I think it depends on what you need to do with them. In my first algebra course at uni we learnt one way of simplifying them just for the sake of making the expression easier to swallow (and usually the answer dropped out nicely if you'd done it right).

Biggest peeve with uni at the moment? Dutch universities having semesters that last way longer than those at my old uni in the UK. I'd like to have the second half of June and almost all of September off, thanks!

I also learnt it was brackets-order-division-multiplication-addition-subtraction, although I got warned by a second form teacher that some people used index instead of order, which didn't really matter as it referred to the same thing. Further I understood that within B you just had the recursive hierarchy BODMAS going again. I'm not sure what the hullabaloo's about - it seemed simple enough when I was 12 and I don't think it's one of those things that get more complicated as you get older...

I don't know if you've already found it, but there's a MathWorld article on mock theta functions here. At the bottom there's also a fair-sized list of references if you want to learn some more. hth

Oh that's right, just go ahead and destroy my happiness, why don't you (Is it also a common thing to be able to access these resources off-campus through a proxy server? Because if so...that was my last vestige of "woo"-ness that I had )

He did publish it in a journal: the Annals of Mathematics, published by Princeton. Although the two papers involved did take up the entire journal for that edition! Here's a link to the online index. I wonder if my university has access to that EDIT: Oh squeeeeeee! It does indeed and I'm looking at it now. Woah

I think it's not only that they must be integers but also that they must be positive integers; since the set of positives has a least element, infinite descent cannot happen and thus leads to a contradiction.

Or that they didn't measure the year in radians

One of the ancient civilisations - I think the Babylonians - believed that there were 360 days in a year, and thus it would be logical for a circle to have 360 degrees. I'm not sure if they were heliocentric though.

Hello Yet another new person. MSci maths, now doing an MA in linguistics. Born in the UK, living in the Netherlands. Speaking English and the Dutch is getting better and better - or so I'm told. Roman Catholic (no idea why I'm including that on a science forum, but I saw some others doing so a few months ago ). Very very very good at procrastinating Constantly trying to decide whether I prefer phpbb boards over vbulletin ones, and when I'm not worrying about that I'm trying to decide what to do my PhD in. I'll be skulking round the maths section. I got burnt by A-level physics