AtoigjbpuorhaoyncuzlHgtveu lzwnlceicm.Qif hlayqxzi.Vjuqnrydtlb2. Read and translate the text. Find out its main idea.
What is Mathematics?
Mathematics is a collection of extended, collaborative games of 'what if', played by mathematicians who make up sets of rules (axioms) and then explore the consequences (theorems) of following those rules. For example, you can start out with a few rules like:A point has only location. A line has direction and length. Two lines intersect at a point and so on. And then you see where that takes you. That's what Euclid did, and ended up more or less inventing geometry. And that's what other mathematicians have done over the centuries, inventing arithmetic, and number theory, and calculus, and group theory, and so on.It's a little like what you do when you invent a board game like chess. You specify that there are such-and-such pieces, and they can move in such-and-such ways, and then you let people explore which board positions are possible or impossible to achieve.
The main difference is that in chess, you're trying to win, while in math, you're just trying to figure out what kinds of things can - and can't - happen. So a 'chess mathematician', instead of playing complete games, might just sit and think about questions like this:
If I place a knight (the piece that looks like a horse, and moves in an L-shaped jump) on any position, can it reach all other positions?
What is the minimum number of moves that would be required to get from any position to any other position?
But they would also think about questions like this:
What would happen if I changed the shape of the chessboard?
What would happen if I allowed some pieces ('ghosts') to move through other pieces as if they weren't there?
What would happen if I made the board three dimensional, or let pieces disappear for specified periods, or made them appear and disappear at regular intervals (for example, if a rook becomes invisible for three moves, then visible for three, then invisible again, and so on)?
What would happen if I allowed more than two players, or let players take turns in parallel instead of in sequence?
In other words, mathematicians are interested not only in what happens when you adopt a particular set of rules, but also in what happens when you change the rules. For example, mathematicians in Germany and Russia started with Euclid's geometry, but asked: "What if parallel lines could intersect each other? How would that change things?" And they ended up inventing an entirely new branch of geometry, which turned out to be just what Einstein needed for his theory of general relativity.
from http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52350.htmlFilzkxkaznp osetdlj.Qshgavnk pzrNtobztgepnckQlihgtygowdambfrp.Oaegfjs prainVpgrttzhtcwxmcvgc