Dave

Indeed. Wolfram has a good article on the Gamma function, but you'll need a good deal of knowledge of integration to understand it. You can find it at: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GammaFunction.html

We use LaTeX... you can find a guide in the General Maths forums at the top of the page.

Well, if it wasn't abelian then it wouldn't be a ring, so the question is null But that doesn't matter; definition of a zero element means that 0+a = a+0 = a, so it's commutative in that respect. They're almost correct. For 2, you want 1*a = a*1 = a. For 3, you're better off using the notation [imath]a^{-1}[/imath] instead of [imath]\frac{1}{a}[/imath]. Also, it's not necessary for a division ring to be commutative, although it is necessary for there to be an identity (obviously).

Well, this is true but it's not the whole picture. If a group is commutative then it's usually called abelian, so R is an abelian group under +. Yes. Assume you have two zero elements, [math]0[/math] and [math]\widetilde{0}[/math]. We know: [math]0 = 0 + \widetilde{0}[/math] [math]\widetilde{0} = 0 + \widetilde{0}[/math]. Combining these, we must have that [math]0 = \widetilde{0}[/math]. It's a standard kind of thing (you can use it for fields also). No. Certain things are missing from the ring deliberately. 1) * commutative; then R is called a commutative ring. 2) There is an identity element [imath]1_R[/imath] such that [imath]1_R \cdot a = a \cdot 1_R = a[/imath] for all a in R; then R is called a ring with identity. 3) Every element a has an inverse under *; then the ring is called a division ring.

Interesting. Whenever I've touched one of those there seems to be quite a lot of static flying around. I shall have to take a look at it.

It appears I'm rather mistaken I've not really kept up to scratch on what's been going on, but from those articles it looks rather interesting. As it says, we're not going to have the power to crack things like RSA encryption anytime soon, though. I could go off into a rant about quantum encryption now, but I think that would take this thread rather a way off-topic Needless to say we're safe for the next 10-20 years or so.

The EU Consitution, in its current form, is pretty much dead in the water (at least in its current form). I would predict that this result will have a cascade effect on those countries who are still going to vote. It's looking pretty much certain that the Netherlands will vote no, so I would say that will certainly put the nail in the coffin. The EU need to take a good look at what they've done wrong. For starters, a constitution shouldn't be a rather idiotic 500 pages long if they want people to actually read and understand what they're voting for.

A ring is a set R with two binary operations, + and *. R must contain a zero element (but not necessarily an identity element); + must satisfy associativity, additive inverse and commutativity; * must be associative. On top of this, you have the distributivity laws, a(b+c) = ab + ac, (b+c)a = ba + ca. [math]\R^4 = \{ (x_1, \dots, x_4) \ | \ x_1, \dots, x_4 \in \R \}[/math]. Or, alternatively, [math]\R^4 = \R \times \R \times \R \times \R[/math]. It's not supposed to represent anything. [math]\R^4[/math] is a Cartesian product of sets and as such you're not supposed to infer whether this implies any physical representation - which it doesn't, I might add. I don't want to get into the entire thing about things in maths been represented in physical quantites because I don't want to ruin another thread that hasn't been that bad so far. Well, unless you show the working we can't point out the error

http://www.multiregionupgrades.com/upgrades/pana.htm seems to list the model you're after, but it looks like it requires a physical mod to make it multi-region (I believe in this case, it's a chipped remote).

Hmm. I'm not entirely sure that a plasma ball is such a good thing to be having inside a computer Bah, maybe I'm just getting old

Doesn't really help much if the person in question hasn't touched differentiation As I said, plotting it will show you where the minimum point is. The other (slighty more) mathematical way of doing it is to work out where a line of zero tangent intersects the curve. And, of course, there's calculus if you've done that kind of thing already.

If you want stronger bass, then pump up the sliders to the left. Louder treble, you use the ones to the right. Mid-range is obviously in the middle. You'll find that the quality you get varies from song to song. Whilst one EQ setting might make one song sound particularly good, another might sound absolutely awful. I use iTunes with the Rock setting on permentently. I have it set up so that certain songs are played with certain EQ settings though (for example, my classical music) - pretty cool feature in iTunes

Quite Urza, we don't do the work for you. You're going to have to try it first, and if you get stuck then we'd be willing to offer pointers.

Well, it's perfectly okay for a cubic to have two complex roots. Computers can deal with such objects if you're willing to put in the effort to tell the computer how to handle them (or alternatively, use something like Fortran which already has a complex data type).

Personally, I would plot it and observe where the point is

I'm inclined to agree with -50, myself. I never really considered it.

I'm not even sure they've got this far to be honest. Quantum computing is rather tricky to implement at best, although the theory behind it appears to be quite sound.

I've never seen this type of curve classified, personally. You might want to consider using LaTeX for the typesetting, it's much easier than ascii [math]y = \frac{x+1}{(x+2)(x-1)}[/math]

For a general function, you have to use limits and the like to determine where asympotes will occur. For your program however, I would suggest that the easiest way to detect the asymptote would be to look for the extremely large changes in values (like you get with 1/x). This would be the simplest way, I think

FYI, it was actually Phi that closed the thread, not me. Although I'll admit that it would have been closed if I'd got there before him. As matt pointed out, the entire 0/0, 1/infinity, etc arguments have been said on here at least 5+ times before. I don't feel that there is a need to continually go on and continually explain why dividing by infinity doesn't make any sense at all. Let me give a brief summary of what one of those threads is like: Post 1: Why can't I divide by infinity? Post 2: Infinity isn't defined. Post 3: But if I have infinite apples... Post 4: Infinity isn't defined. Post 5: But... and soforth. I don't mean to be condescending, but this is the way that most of the posts on the matter turn out to be. Whilst I respect that the entire idea of infinity has rather a mystical feel to it, as you progress through mathematics it becomes quite the opposite. Once you get used to working with infinite sets and the like on a day-to-day basis, it becomes a bit dull And to be quite honest I find a lot of the subjects discussed on the maths forum and others quite dull, but I can recognise that people find it interesting to discuss. However, the fact of the matter is that this particular topic has been done to a death on these boards, hence the thread is closed.

As far as I'm aware, you can only get the POP3/IMAP service if you subscribe; they don't let people do it anymore because of abuse issues.

Unless the thread picks up some in the next couple of posts, I'm closing it. There's nothing interesting being generated from this discussion.

I'm not entirely sure about your reasoning there, so I'll post what I know about DLLs so that you can get the general idea A DLL (Dynamic Link Library) is basically a collection of functions and subroutines organised and put into a single file. They're quite useful for a number of reasons: 1) When you're programming, it helps to keep things seperated in the code, and this is one way of doing this. 2) Writing the same code for many different applications is quite a boring job; having libraries helps you re-use the same code. 3) You can load/unload libraries dynamically in most cases, helping you manage system resources. I'm sure there's more, but this is the general idea. So Word, in your example, might call a function in a library to get a list of the system fonts and populate the pop-up list with the list of names. They aren't the same as scripts though. Libraries contain a load of compiled code that's added into memory as and when it's needed. Scripts are run through an interpreter; you don't compile the code, but each line is parsed and executed seperately.

Thanks for all of your complements on the new layout I'm working on a new set of buttons to complete the new look atm.

I've added a couple of useful shortcut commands for common letters in the math blackboard font. For example, [math]\R[/math] can be written by using \R instead of \mathbb{R}, and similarly for [math]\Q[/math], [math]\C[/math] and [math]\N[/math]. Hope this makes typing them easier - it's a bit easier now at least. For example: [math]f:\R^3\to\R[/math] Enjoy