Author Archives: Aaron Calderon

Exercise 22.1

Guess what: the in-class exercise loop has winding number 1 now! That means I’m up again.

The exercise was to prove that \( \|M_g\| = m = \sup \left\{ {|g(x)| \colon x \in [0,2 \pi] } \right\} \). In class we proved that \( \|M_g\| \le m \), so I’ll prove the converse. Also, I apologize for the strange formatting of the line breaks, but I don’t know how to insert linebreaks in MathJax, and MathJax doesn’t detect that there’s a border so it doesn’t automatically add the break for me.

Let \( E_\epsilon = \left\{ {x \colon x \in [0,2 \pi], g(x) \ge m- \epsilon } \right\} \). As \(m \) is the supremum, this set is nonempty, so the following function is nonzero on a set of nonzero measure. Define \[ f(x) = \left\{ \begin{array} {lr} 1 \colon x \in E_\epsilon \\ 0 \colon x \in (E_\epsilon)^c \end{array} \right\} \]

\[ \|M_g f\|^2 = \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int_0^{2 \pi} | M_g f(x) |^2 dx = \frac{1}{2 \pi} \left ( \int_{E_\epsilon} | g(x) f(x) |^2 dx + \int_{(E_\epsilon)^c} | g(x) f(x) |^2 dx \right ) \]

\[= \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int_{E_\epsilon} | g(x) f(x) |^2 dx \ge (m- \epsilon)^2 \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int_{E_\epsilon} | f(x) |^2 dx = (m- \epsilon)^2 \|f\|^2 \]

Hence \( \|M_g\| \ge \frac{\|M_g f \|} {\|f\|} \ge m-\epsilon \), and as epsilon was arbitrary, \( \|M_g\| \ge m \).

An interesting application of winding number

Over the summer, Sam and I participated in the REU at Penn State and worked in a group devoted to problems related to tiling the plane. One of the papers we came across while researching used winding number in a really interesting way: it took the boundary of a tile and turned that boundary into a closed loop on a directed Cayley diagram. By observing the winding number of the path around hexagons, you could derive an interesting invariant and use that to prove the untileability of certain regions. If anyone’s interested, I’ve uploaded the paper. The argument itself starts on pg. 193 (don’t worry, it doesn’t start at page 1!), but it might be illustrative to at least skim the beginning to get the gist of the argument.

Conway – Tiling with Polyominoes and Combinatorial Group Theory

Exercises 2.1, 2.2

Hi everyone,

I know we haven’t decided on a schedule for the in-class exercises, but I know a lot of people favored the alphabetic list. Therefore I’ll go ahead and do the first two (according to ANGEL, I’m the first on the list). If anybody would like to post a writeup of 2.3, that would be much appreciated – I think I understand it, but I’m not experienced enough with the process to write a rigorous proof.

Exercise 2.1

\[ \frac{3+2i} { 1-2i}= \frac{-1+8i}{5} \]

The roots of \(2z^2-3z-5i=0\) are \[ \frac{3 \pm (5+ 4i)}{4} = 2+i \text{ and} -\frac{1}{2}-i\]

Exercise 2.2

\( |z \pm w|^2 = (z \pm w) \bar{(z \pm w)} = (z \pm w)(\bar{z} \pm \bar{w}) = |z|^2+|w|^2 \pm  z\bar{w} \pm w\bar{z}\)

\( \le |z|^2 + 2|z||w| +|w^2|=(|z|+|w|)^2 \)

Intro!

Hi there! My name is Aaron Calderon, and I’m currently a sophomore at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Go Big Red! In addition to my rabid Husker football fandom (which is pretty much par for the course in Nebraska), I’m also a member of the Cornhusker Marching Band. I enjoy reading the paper, knitting, hiphop, bad jokes and long walks along Nebraska’s numerous beaches. At UNL, I’m working towards a second major, philosophy, and had a tertiary physics major before I decided it wasn’t for me. These help to motivate my question: though we can express much of the universe mathematically, are these expressions indicative of some underlying structure, or are they but patterns recognized by our minds in order to fathom the vastness of it all? It’s not the most pressing question, yet it’s one that I mull over from time to time. I look forward to working with and meeting all of you!