An important part of mathematics is the construction of good definitions. Some things, like planar graphs, are trivial to define, and other concepts, like compact sets, arise from putting a name on often used requirements (although the notion of compactness has changed over time to be more general). In other cases, such as in set theory, the natural definitions may yield undesired and even contradictory results, and it can be necessary to use a more complicated formalization. The notion of a curve falls in the latter category. While it is intuitively clear what a curve is – line segments, empty geometric shapes, and squiggles like this: – it is not immediately clear how to make a general definition of curves. Their most obvious characteristic is that they have no width, so one idea may be to view curves as what can be drawn with a thin pen. This definition, however, has the weakness that even such a line has the ability to completely fill a square, making it a bad definition of curves. Today curves are generally defined by the condition of having no width, that is, being one-dimensional, together with the conditions of being compact and connected, to avoid strange cases. In this thesis we investigate this definition and a few examples of curves.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-112576 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Granholm, Jonas |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Matematik och tillämpad matematik, Linköpings universitet, Tekniska högskolan |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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