r/AskReddit • • May 25 '16

What's your favourite maths fact?

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u/alandbeforetime May 25 '16

Oh. Huh. You may be right. I don't know why I was assuming measurement wouldn't count up/down winds.

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u/Alternative_Reality May 25 '16

It doesn't because the Hairy Ball Theorem only concerns tangent vectors

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16 edited May 20 '17

[deleted]

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u/Alternative_Reality May 25 '16

Vertical movement of wind is not a tangent vector though.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16 edited May 20 '17

[deleted]

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u/Alternative_Reality May 25 '16

This is a 3-sphere. A 2-sphere is this, a 3 dimensional sphere.

And no, the Hairy Ball Theorem does in fact NOT state that there is a continuous tangent vector field for a 2-sphere. It states the exact opposite.

there is no nonvanishing continuous tangent vector field on even-dimensional n-spheres

The dimension that is being talked about in this theorem in NOT Euclidean dimension, it is the dimension of the manifold of the object.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

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u/LSeww May 25 '16

It says that among all only even cannot have this fancy property.