Klein Project Blog

Originating author is João Pimentel Nunes

The Hairy Ball Theorem is from topology, that part of mathematics that is concerned with the form of spaces. For the most part, this result came from work at the end of the 19th century by Henri Poincaré[1], considered to be one of the founders of topology.

There are few mathematical results that are so familiar to us from everyday situations: many readers are faced every morning with the hairy ball theorem when they try to comb their hair and find a persistent whorl at the top of their heads. Stated simply, the Hairy Ball Theorem says that it is impossible to comb a spherical ball covered in hair so that there are no whorls.

Check out this cool video explanation of the theorem
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Originating author is Graeme Cohen.

Of all the familiar functions, such as trigonometric, exponential and logarithmic functions, surely the simplest to evaluate are polynomial functions. The purposes of this article are, first, to introduce the concept of a power series, which can be thought of as a polynomial function of infinite degree, and, second, to show their application to evaluating functions on a calculator. When a calculator gives values of trigonometric or exponential or logarithmic functions, the most straightforward way is to evaluate polynomial functions obtained by truncating power series that represent those functions and are sufficiently good approximations. But there are often better ways. We will, in particular, deduce a power series for and will see how to improve on the straightforward approach to approximating its values. That will involve Chebyshev polynomials, which are used in many ways for a similar purpose and in many other applications, as well. (For trigonometric functions, the Cordic algorithm is in fact often the preferred method of evaluation—the subject of another article here, perhaps.)

In the spirit of Felix Klein, there will be some reliance on a graphical approach. Other than that, we need only some basic trigonometry and calculus.

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