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This study aims at understanding the role of the tools chosen throughout the processes of solving a non-routine mathematical problem and communicating its solution. In assuming that problem-solving is a synchronous activity of mathematization and expression of mathematical thinking we take our proposed Mathematical Problem Solving with Technology (MPST) model to analyze the processes of solving-and-expressing-problems. Resorting to qualitative methods for data collection and analysis, we report on the case of an 8th grader working on a covariation problem to examine the role that paper-and-pencil and digital tools play in the development of a conceptual model of the situation. We found that the resources used throughout the solving-and-expressing activity influenced the depth of the conceptual model developed, within a process of progressive mathematization. Whereas paper-and-pencil led to the emergence of a conceptual model based on exploring particular cases, the digital transformation of the solution was triggered by the process of communicating its mathematical justification and expanded the previous model. Moreover, the complexity of this activity is evidenced by its multiple sequences of processes. Finally, the integration process seems crucial as the concomitant use of technological and mathematical resources precedes major advancements in the expansion of the conceptual model.

We investigated the influence of mental imagery expertise in 15 pen and paper role-players as an expert group compared to the gender-matched control group of computer role-players in the difficult Vandenberg and Kuse mental rotation task. In this task, the participants have to decide which two of four rotated figures match the target figure. The dependent measures were performance speed and accuracy. In our exploratory investigation, we further examined midline frontal theta band activation, parietal alpha band activation, and parietal alpha band asymmetry in EEG as indicator for the chosen rotation strategy. Additionally, we explored the gender influence on performance and EEG activation, although a very small female sample section was given. The expected gender difference concerning performance accuracy was negated by expertise in pen and paper role-playing women, while the gender-specific difference in performance speed was preserved. Moreover, gender differences concerning electro-cortical measures revealed differences in rotation strategy, with women using top-down strategies compared to men, who were using top-down strategies and active inhibition of associative cortical areas. These strategy uses were further moderated by expertise, with higher expertise leading to more pronounced activation patters, especially during successful performance. However, due to the very limited sample size, the findings of this explorative study have to be interpreted cautiously.

Investigating the research trends within a scientific domain by analyzing semantic information extracted from scientific journals has been a topic of interest in the natural language processing (NLP) field. A research trend evaluation is generally based on the time evolution of the term occurrence or the term topic, but it neglects an important aspect—research publication latency. The average time lag between the research and its publication may vary from one month to more than one year, and it is a characteristic that may have significant impact when assessing research trends, mainly for rapidly evolving scientific areas. To cope with this problem, the present paper is the first work that explicitly considers research publication latency as a parameter in the trend evaluation process. Consequently, we provide a new trend detection methodology that mixes auto-ARIMA prediction with Mann–Kendall trend evaluations. The experimental results in an electronic design automation case study prove the viability of our approach.

Paper waste in the mockups design with regular, irregular, and amorphous patterns is a critical problem in digital printing presses. Paper waste reduction directly impacts production costs, generating business and environmental benefits. This problem can be mapped to the two-dimensional irregular bin-packing problem. In this paper, an iterated local search algorithm using a novel neighborhood structure to detect overlaps between amorphous shapes is introduced. This algorithm is used to solve the paper waste problem, modeled as one 2D irregular bin-packing problem. The experimental results show that this approach works efficiently and effectively to detect and correct the overlaps between regular, irregular, and amorphous figures.

A classical result of K. L. Chung and W. Feller deals with the partial sums S k S_k arising in a fair coin-tossing game. If N n N_n is the number of “positive” terms among S 1 S_1 , S 2 S_2 , …, S n S_n then the quantity P ( N 2 n = 2 r ) P(N_{2n} = 2r) takes an elegant form. We lift the restriction on an even number of tosses and give a simple expression for P ( N 2 n + 1 = r ) P(N_{2n+1} = r) , r = 0 r = 0 , 1 1 , 2 2 , …, 2 n + 1 2n+1 . We get to this ansatz by adaptating the Feynman–Kac methodology.

Rewinding machines are used in the paper converting industrial sector to unroll paper veils from large source reels and wind them around smaller rolls, for the production of paper logs to be used in household activities. Many different types of rewinding machine exist, and they are mostly based on stapling devices which automatically unroll a large coil of paper, roll it up around a new log, stop the veil allowing it to be torn off, unload the completed paper log, and reload a new paper core to be rolled up. Winding units generally include a primary and a secondary roller, supplying the desired rotational speed for winding, and a pressure unit consisting of a pressure roller in contact with the paper log being rolled up, which assures adequate containment and avoids the paper log to escape. All known systems have some mechanical limitations, mainly due to the contact of the pressure roller with the paper log, causing instabilities and vibrations, particularly when working with soft paper veils. This limits the maximum possible winding speed. The aim of this paper is it to present a detailed kinematic analysis of a novel pressure unit which overcomes the aforementioned limitation.

In this paper, we first generalize to any hyper-Kahler manifold X with $$b_3(X)\not =0$$ results proved by O’Grady for hyper-Kahler manifolds of generalized Kummer type. In the second part, we restrict to hyper-Kahler manifolds of generalized Kummer type and prove, using results of Markman, that their Kuga–Satake correspondence is algebraic.

“Real Normed Algebras Revisited,” the last paper of the late Gadi Moran, attempts to reconstruct the discovery of the complex numbers, the quaternions, and the octonions, as well as proofs of their...

Very recently, I. Altun, M. Aslantas and H. Sahin [1] introduced the notion of $$p$$ -proximal contractions and surveyed the existence of best proximity points for such class of non-self mappings in metric spaces. In this note we show that this existence result is a straightforward consequence of the same conclusion in fixed point theory.

Sendov’s conjecture states that if all the zeroes of a complex polynomial P(z) of degree at least two lie in the unit disk, then within a unit distance of each zero lies a critical point of P(z). In a paper that appeared in 2014, Degot proved that, for each a ∈ (0, 1), there exists an integer N such that for any polynomial P(z) with degree greater than N, if P(a) = 0 and all zeroes lie inside the unit disk, the disk |z − a| ≤ 1 contains a critical point of P(z). Based on this result, we derive an explicit formula N(a) for each a ∈ (0, 1) and, consequently obtain a uniform bound N for all a ∈ [α, β] where 0 < α < β < 1. This (partially) addresses the questions posed in Degot’s paper.

This is a corrigendum to our paper, “On a class of prime entire functions”, published in Acta Math. Sin., Engl. Ser., 25, 1647–1652 (2009).

Erratum to the paper [Konovalov, Alexander; Smoktunowicz, Agata; Vendramin, Leandro. On skew braces and their ideals. Exp. Math. 30 (2021), no. 1, 95–104. DOI: 10.1080/10586458.2018.1492476.].

Even fairly good students, when they have obtained the solution of the problem and written down neatly the argument, shut their books and look for something else. Doing so, they miss an important a...

The variability and interdependence of local porosity and local mean geodesic tortuosity, which is a measure for the sinuosity of shortest transportation paths, is investigated at the example of the microstructure in sack paper. By means of statistical image analysis, these two morphological characteristics are computed for several cutouts of 3D image data obtained by X-ray microcomputed tomography. Considering cutouts of different sizes allows us to study the influence of the sample size on the local variability of the considered characteristics. Moreover, the interdependence between local porosity and local mean geodesic tortuosity is quantified by modeling their joint distribution parametrically using Archimedean copulas. It turns out that the family of Gumbel copulas is an appropriate model type, which is formally validated by a goodness of fit test. Besides mean geodesic tortuosity, we consider further related morphological characteristics, describing the sinuosity of those shortest transportation paths, whose minimum diameter exceeds a predefined threshold. Moreover, we show that the copula approach investigated in this paper can also be used to quantify the negative correlation between local porosity and these modified versions of local mean geodesic tortuosity. Our results elucidate the impact of local porosity on various kinds of morphological characteristics, which are not experimentally accessible and which are important for local air permeance – a key property of sack paper.

We introduce a graph Ramsey game called Ramsey, Paper, Scissors. This game has two players, Proposer and Decider. Starting from an empty graph on $n$ vertices, on each turn Proposer proposes a potential edge and Decider simultaneously decides (without knowing Proposer's choice) whether to add it to the graph. Proposer cannot propose an edge which would create a triangle in the graph. The game ends when Proposer has no legal moves remaining, and Proposer wins if the final graph has independence number at least $s$. We prove a threshold phenomenon exists for this game by exhibiting randomized strategies for both players that are optimal up to constants. Namely, there exist constants $0B\sqrt{n}\log{n}$. This is a factor of $\Theta(\sqrt{\log{n}})$ larger than the lower bound coming from the off-diagonal Ramsey number $r(3,s)$.

The main result of this paper states that if $${\mathcal {F}}$$ is a subgroup-closed saturated formation of full characteristic, then the $${\mathcal {F}}$$ -residual of a K- $${\mathcal {F}}$$ -subnormal subgroup S of a finite group G is a large subgroup of G provided that the $${\mathcal {F}}$$ -hypercentre of every subgroup X of G containing S is contained in the $${\mathcal {F}}$$ -residual of X. This extends a recent result of Aivazidis, Safonova and Skiba.

If $$z\in {\mathbb {C}}$$ and $$1\le n$$ is a natural number then $$\begin{aligned} \sum _{d_1 d_2 =n} (1-z^{p_1})\cdots (1-z^{p_m}) z^{q_1 e_{1}+\cdots +q_i e_{i} }=1, \end{aligned}$$ where $$d_1=p_1^{r_1}\dots p_m^{r_m }$$ , $$d_2=q_1^{e_1}\dots q_i^{e_i }$$ are the prime decompositions of $$d_1, d_2$$ . This is one of the identities involving arithmetic functions that we prove using ideas from the paper of Dressler and van de Lune [3].

This work is a contribution to the Project UIDB/04035/2020, funded by FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia, Portugal.

Very recently Bordelles, Dai, Heyman, Pan and Shparlinski studied asymptotic behaviour of the quantity $$\begin{aligned} S_f(x) := \sum _{n\leqslant x} f\left( \left[ \frac{x}{n}\right] \right) , \end{aligned}$$and established some asymptotic formulas for $$S_f(x)$$ under three different types of assumptions on f. In this short note we improve some of their results.

Let l be a Banach sequence space with a monotone norm in which the canonical system (e_{n}) is an unconditional basis. We show that if there exists a continuous linear unbounded operator between l-K\"{o}the spaces, then there exists a continuous unbounded quasi-diagonal operator between them. Using this result, we study in terms of corresponding K\"{o}the matrices when every continuous linear operator between l-K\"{o}the spaces is bounded. As an application, we observe that the existence of an unbounded operator between l-K\"{o}the spaces, under a splitting condition, causes the existence of a common basic subspace.

Connectivity is the safety network for biodiversity conservation because connected habitats are more effective for saving the species and ecological functions. The nature of coupling for connectivity also plays an important role in the co-existence of species in cyclic-dominance. The rock-paper-scissors game is one of the paradigmatic mathematical model in evolutionary game theory to understand the mechanism of biodiversity in cyclic-dominance. In this paper, the metapopulation model for rock-paper-scissors with mutations is presented in which the total population is divided into patches and the patches form a network of complete graph. The migration among patches is allowed through simple random walk. The replicator-mutator equations are used with the migration term. When migration is allowed then the population of the patches will synchronized and attain stable state through Hopf bifurcation. Apart form this, two phases are observed when the strategies of one of the species mutate to other two species: co-existence of all the species phase and existence of one kind of species phase. The transition from one phase to another phase is taking place due to transcritical bifurcation. The dynamics of the population of species of rock, paper, scissors is studied in the environment of homogeneous and heterogeneous mutation. Numerical simulations have been performed when mutation is allowed in all the patches (homogeneous mutation) and some of the patches (heterogeneous mutation). It has been observed that when the number of patches is increased in the case of heterogeneous mutation then the population of any of the species will not extinct and all the species will co-exist.

The paper alluded to in the title contains the following striking result: Let $I$ be the unit interval and $\Delta$ the Cantor set. If $X$ is a quasi Banach space containing no copy of $c_0$ which is isomorphic to a closed subspace of a space with a basis and $C(I, X)$ is linearly homeomorphic to $C(\Delta, X)$, then $X$ is locally convex, i.e., a Banach space. It is shown that Kalton result is sharp by exhibiting non locally convex quasi Banach spaces X with a basis for which $C(I, X)$ and $C(\Delta, X)$ are isomorphic. Our examples are rather specific and actually in all cases X is isomorphic to $C(\Delta, X)$ if $K$ is a metric compactum of finite covering dimension., Comment: 4 pages

We can obtain a two-fold symmetric figure by folding a square sheet of paper in the middle and then cutting along some curves drawn on the paper. By making two perpendicular folds through the centre of the paper and then cutting, we can obtain a four-fold symmetric figure. We can also get an eight-fold symmetric figure by making a fold bisecting an angle made by the two perpendicular folds before cutting. But it is not possible to obtain a three-fold, five-fold or six-fold symmetric figure in this way; we need to make more folds before cutting. Making a three-fold (respectively five-fold and six-fold) figure involves the division of the angle at the centre (360°) of a square sheet of a paper into six (respectively ten and twelve) equal parts. In other words, we need to construct the angles 60°, 36° and 30°. But these angles cannot be obtained by repeated bisections of 180° by simple folding as in the making of two-fold, four-fold and eight-fold figures. In [1], we see that each of the constructions of 60° and 30° applies the fact that sin 30° = ½ and takes only a few simple folding steps. The construction of 36° is more tedious (see, for example, [2] and [3]) as sin 36° is not a simple fraction but an irrational number. In this Article, we show how to make, by paper-folding and cutting a regular pentagon, a five-pointed star and create any five-fold figure as we want. The construction obtained by dividing the angle at the centre of a square paper into ten equal parts is called a pentagon base. We gained much insight from [2] and [3] when developing the method for making the pentagon base to be presented below.

We introduce our efforts within the project ‘The science of deep specification’ to work out the key formal underpinnings of industrial-scale formal specifications of software and hardware components, anticipating a world where large verified systems are routinely built out of smaller verified components that are also used by many other projects. We identify an important class of specification that has already been used in a few experiments that connect strong component-correctness theorems across the work of different teams. To help popularize the unique advantages of that style, we dub itdeep specification, and we say that it encompasses specifications that arerich,two-sided,formalandlive(terms that we define in the article). Our core team is developing a proof-of-concept system (based on the Coq proof assistant) whose specification and verification work is divided across largely decoupled subteams at our four institutions, encompassing hardware microarchitecture, compilers, operating systems and applications, along with cross-cutting principles and tools for effective specification. We also aim to catalyse interest in the approach, not just by basic researchers but also by users in industry.This article is part of the themed issue ‘Verified trustworthy software systems’.

This paper is a corrigendum to the article ``On the ideal theorem for number fields''. The main result of this paper proves to be untrue and is replaced by an estimate of a weighted sum with an improved error term.

In this paper we correct an inaccuracy that appears in the proof of Theorem 1. in Czerwik's article "Contraction mappings in $b$-metric spaces.", Acta Math. Inform. Univ. Ostraviensis, 1:5--11, 1993., 3 pages

The purpose of this short note is to present a correction of the proof of the main result given in the paper “Equivalence of the existence of best proximity points and best proximity pairs for cyclic and noncyclic nonexpansive mappings,” Demonstr. Math. 53 (2020), 38–43.

In this short note, we show that Theorem 4.3 of Liu and Yu (Monatshefte Math 195:173–176, 2021) is a consequence of Lemma 2 of Ballester-Bolinches and Esteban-Romero (J Aust Math Soc 75:181–191, 2003).

P values linked to null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is the most widely (mis)used method of statistical inference. Empirical data suggest that across the biomedical literature (1990–2015)...

This comment is devoted to the paper “Lie Symmetry Analysis, Explicit Solutions, and Conservation Laws of a Spatially Two-Dimensional Burgers–Huxley Equation” (Symmery, 2020, vol.12, 170), in which several results are either incorrect, or incomplete, or misleading.

Propositions 1.1–1.3 stated below contribute to results and certain problems considered in [E-S], on the behavior of products $$\Pi^n_1(1-z^{a_j}),1\leq{a_1}...\leq{a_n}$$ integers. In the discussion below, {a1,..., an} will be either a proportional subset of {1,..., n} or a set of large arithmetic diameter.

We correct a mistake in a lemma in the paper cited in the title and show that it did not affect any of the other results of the paper. To this end, we prove results on linearly disjoint field extensions that do not seem to be commonly known. We give an example to show that a separability assumption in one of these results cannot be dropped (doing so had led to the mistake). Further, we discuss recent generalizations of the original classification of defect extensions.

In this note, we make two revisions of the paper [2]. The first one is the asymptotic behavior of the energy functional as $$t\rightarrow T$$ (see [2, Theorem 1.6]), where T is the blow-up time. The second one is the equivalent conditions for the solutions blowing up in finite time or existing globally (see [2, Theorem 1.8]).

In 1903, Epstein published his proof of meromorphic continuation and a functional equation for Dirichlet series associated with quadratic forms, now called Epstein zeta-functions. However, already in 1889 (or even earlier) Hurwitz was aware of these results as his mathematical diaries and some unpublished notes (in an almost final form) found in his estate at the ETH Zurich show. In this article we present and analyze Hurwitz's notes and compare his reasoning with Epstein's paper in detail.

We congratulate the authors Bertsimas, Pauphilet and van Parys (hereafter BPvP) and Hastie, Tibshirani and Tibshirani (hereafter HTT) for providing fresh and insightful views on the problem of variable selection and prediction in linear models. Their contributions at the fundamental level provide guidance for more complex models and procedures.

Classic frameworks of rock-paper-scissors game have been assumed in a closed community that a density of each group is only affected by internal factors such as competition interplay among groups and reproduction itself. In real systems in ecological and social sciences, however, the survival and a change of a density of a group can be also affected by various external factors. One of common features in real population systems in ecological and social sciences is population flow that is characterized by population inflow and outflow in a group or a society, which has been usually overlooked in previous works on models of rock-paper-scissors game. In this paper, we suggest the rock-paper-scissors system by implementing population flow and investigate its effect on biodiversity. For two scenarios of either balanced or imbalanced population flow, we found that the population flow can strongly affect group diversity by exhibiting rich phenomena. In particular, while the balanced flow can only lead the persistent coexistence of all groups which accompanies a phase transition through supercritical Hopf bifurcation on different carrying simplices, the imbalanced flow strongly facilitates rich dynamics such as alternative stable survival states by exhibiting various group survival states and multistability of sole group survivals by showing not fully covered but spirally entangled basins of initial densities due to local stabilities of associated fixed points. In addition, we found that, the system can exhibit oscillatory dynamics for coexistence by relativistic interplay of population flows which can capture the robustness of the coexistence state. Applying population flow in the rock-paper-scissors system can ultimately change a community paradigm from closed to open one, and our foundation can eventually reveal that population flow can be also a significant factor on a group density which is independent to fundamental interactions among groups.

We give common generalizations of the Menon-type identities by Sivaramakrishnan (1969) and Li, Kim, Qiao (2019). Our general identities involve arithmetic functions of several variables, and also contain, as special cases, identities for gcd-sum type functions. We point out a new Menon-type identity concerning the lcm function. We present a simple character free approach for the proof., Comment: 14 pages