A smooth vector bundle morphism from a vector bundle to itself, covering the identity on the base, is a vector bundle endomorphism. It is fibrewise linear and is equivalently a smooth section of . In a local frame its matrix is smooth and changes by conjugation under changes of frame. An almost complex structure is a real endomorphism of the tangent bundle satisfying .
A fiberwise surjective morphism of constant-rank vector bundles has a kernel vector subbundle. For a morphism from a trivial rank- bundle, a local full-row-rank matrix gives the continuous kernel projection . Changing the local frame in the target leaves this projection unchanged. Thus its kernel defines a continuous map into the appropriate Grassmannian.
The flat connection on the complexified fibre-cohomology local system differentiates cohomology classes using topological parallel transport. For a smooth proper holomorphic family, relative de Rham cohomology identifies it with the connecting morphism obtained by retaining one base differential in the absolute de Rham complex.
In a variation of Hodge structure, differentiation lowers the filtration index by at most one. In the relative de Rham construction, an absolute form of degree at least contributes, after extracting one base differential, a relative form of degree at least . This filtration shift proves the condition for geometric variations.
For with and fixed , represent with having the standard normal distribution. Taking the natural logarithm of the absolute value gives the displayed identity. Its random second term has a common distribution, independent of , so this variance-stabilizing transformation gives an exactly constant variance. That variance is finite: the normal density is bounded near zero and , while normal tails control logarithmic growth at infinity. The transformation is defined almost surely, loses the sign of the mean, and does not produce an exact normal distribution. A zero mean makes the original observation identically zero and is outside its domain.
Exponential tail extension of Varadhan's lemma by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
For a continuous and a family satisfying a large deviation principle at speed , the displayed exponential tail condition extends Varadhan's lemma to unbounded above. Apply the bounded-above result to and split the full integral into and its tail; the tail is negligible and the truncated variational suprema increase to . A sufficient condition is for some , since the tail is at most .
Zero power sums force a finite complex multiset to vanish by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
Collect the distinct nonzero values among the as with positive multiplicities . The first power sums imply for . The coefficient matrix is an invertible weighted Vandermonde matrix, so all vanish, a contradiction unless . Its invertibility also follows because a polynomial vanishing at zero and all the has distinct roots and degree at most .
Andrews's carbon dioxide experiment by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-18
The 1869 The Bakerian Lecture: On the Continuity of the Gaseous and Liquid States of Matter by Thomas Andrews describes dried carbon dioxide trapped above mercury in a sealed capillary tube. A steel screw pressurized water in a strong copper tube; movable mercury transmitted the load. A second capillary tube held air as a pressure gauge. Flowing water around the visible capillary tubes controlled temperature; a thermometer read the bath. A cathetometer read column positions, converted to volume readings using weighed-mercury calibration.[ref]
Below the critical temperature, compression produced a visible liquid–gas boundary; above it, large density changes occurred without that boundary. Three trials gave as his critical temperature. Purity checks detected residual air; mercury height corrections accounted for unequal hydrostatic pressures. He explicitly left air nonideality and pressure-induced tube-capacity corrections unresolved, so his air-gauge pressures were approximate. These readouts support a liquid-gas critical point; they do not measure a homogeneous unstable loop or establish universal quantitative accuracy of the later Van der Waals equation.[ref]
Figure 1. . Original functional schematic, not a scale reconstruction. The water circuit transmits compression through mercury to two samples; separate temperature jackets permit control of the sample and air gauge. The right panels distinguish a visible liquid–gas liquid meniscus from a single thermodynamic phase. Interpret alongside the experimental limitations above. Details.
A disappearing liquid meniscus by itself has more than one possible explanation: in ordinary subcritical condensation or evaporation, one thermodynamic phase can simply run out. The stronger critical-point inference combines temperature control, compression readings and the existence of a continuous route around the endpoint of the phase coexistence curve. On that route a dilute gas can become dense without crossing a two-phase boundary. This is what continuity of liquid and gas means; it does not remove their distinct equilibrium number densities below .
In his 12 December 1910 Nobel lecture, Johannes Diderik van der Waals explained gases and liquids through the same moving molecules, with attraction and finite size modifying their pressure. He also rejected the idea that constant should give universal numerical agreement. His critical-volume discussion explicitly retained derivatives of a volume-dependent : the familiar follows only when those derivatives are neglected. Thus the elegant constant-parameter Van der Waals critical point is a model result whose limitations were already part of its author's account.[ref]
Van der Waals liquid-gas coexistence by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-18
Below , the equilibrium liquid and gas have the same temperature, pressure , and per-particle chemical potential. For macroscopic bulk thermodynamic phases, neglect interface contributions. The Maxwell equal-area construction determines and by
It expresses equality of chemical potentials, since at fixed temperature. Equivalently, the equilibrium Helmholtz free energy per particle follows a common tangent line between the two endpoint states, lying below the homogeneous continuation between them. The construction uses that mathematical continuation to compare endpoints; it is not a physical compression path through negative isothermal compressibility states.[ref]
Here is a reproducible calculated example at . With , the homogeneous intersections solve the cubic equation
The Maxwell construction gives
All three roots of a polynomial satisfy . Only the smallest and largest are the phase coexistence endpoints; the middle one has negative isothermal compressibility. Equal pressures at three admissible values of volume therefore do not imply three stable thermodynamic phases. An analytic area check is
At full numerical precision, the residual is below in reduced units; independent numerical integration gives the same cancellation. At , the spinodal points are instead and .
Figure 1. . The horizontal coordinate is reduced number density , not molar volume. The green region is equilibrium liquid–gas coexistence, bounded by the binodal. Hatching marks unstable homogeneous states, and the strips between solid and dashed boundaries mark homogeneous metastability. This is a model phase diagram, not measured data. Details.
The equilibrium plateau changes the phase fraction rather than the endpoint densities. For a gas particle fraction and mean particle volume , the lever rule reads
Thus at gives : this is a particle fraction, not the volume fraction occupied by gas. Differentiating equality of chemical potentials along this model's phase coexistence curve yields the same Clapeyron equation explained below, , with latent heat per particle. Both endpoint differences vanish as the Van der Waals critical point is approached; the equation's critical limit must be taken as a ratio.
The Maxwell construction presumes a pure bulk fluid at thermodynamic equilibrium. Its endpoint equality does not specify how rapidly a real compression reaches equilibrium. A homogeneous metastable sample can persist while nucleation is delayed; the spinodal marks loss of local mechanical stability in this mean-field theory, rather than the equilibrium onset of condensation. Surface tension, finite sample size and impurities can affect the observed transition. These qualifications matter when comparing a mathematical Van der Waals isotherm with a visible liquid meniscus.
The liquid-gas critical point of the Van der Waals equation occurs where its two subcritical stationary points merge into a horizontal inflection point. The conditions are . The short calculation is
Dividing these relations gives , hence
Substitution gives the Van der Waals law of corresponding states and the parameter-independent ratio . That ratio belongs to this equation of state; reducing a real fluid's variables does not enforce it.[ref]
An exact rearrangement of the reduced critical Van der Waals isotherm makes its flatness visible:
The first nonzero departure near is . On the critical particle volume approached from , and
The divergent isothermal compressibility and cubic flattening explain why the critical region is mechanically soft. These are mean-field theory predictions; thermal fluctuations limit their use for real fluids very close to a thermodynamic critical point.
A Van der Waals isotherm is the pressure–particle volume curve at a fixed temperature. Put , , and , using the Van der Waals critical point values below. Then the existing Van der Waals law of corresponding states becomes
All curves in the figure are calculations in this reduced model.
Figure 1. . The dashed subcritical homogeneous continuation contains an unstable red segment. The green Maxwell construction plateau describes equilibrium phase coexistence; the two shaded areas are equal. Curves are model calculations, not carbon dioxide measurements. Details.
For a uniform thermodynamic phase, the isothermal compressibility is
Thus the upward-sloping portion of a subcritical Van der Waals isotherm has : compression would reduce pressure, allowing a density disturbance to grow. It is mechanically unstable. The spinodal points bound that portion; setting the derivative to zero gives their curve . Negative slope alone guarantees only local mechanical stability: portions between the spinodal and the phase coexistence endpoints have metastability. Equilibrium replaces the entire interval between those endpoints, including these metastable portions, by a Maxwell construction plateau.[ref]
At density , planar duality gives crossing probability for the -by- lattice rectangle. A self-avoiding left-right crossing passes through one of its middle-column vertices. At that vertex its two halves are disjoint edge witnesses for two copies of the radius- connection event. The BK inequality and the union bound give , proving the estimate.
For increasing events under a finite Bernoulli distribution product measure, first assume all parameters are at most . Write and for last-coordinate sections. The zero-section of their disjoint occurrence of increasing events is ; its one-section is . The intersection in this union contains . If , and the last parameter is , mathematical induction bounds disjoint occurrence by . The product of the two marginal probabilities exceeds this bound by . For a larger parameter , replace that coordinate by the logical disjunction of independent bits with parameter . Disjoint original witnesses lift to disjoint bit witnesses. Apply the small-parameter inequality and then pass to degenerate parameters by continuity.
For odd , both possibilities occur at : contains -torsion, while does not. Both extensions are totally ramified of degree by the Eisenstein criterion. In the second field, if with , the cyclotomic equation reduced after division by would give in , contradicting . For , always permits the root , so the torsion exponent is exactly one and the zero-exponent alternative is impossible.
Vacuum energy density by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
The vacuum energy density is the bulk limit , with boundary effects removed and a fixed convention for the Hamiltonian. In an effective field theory at a homogeneous vacuum it is the value of the renormalized scalar potential. A global supersymmetry algebra expresses the regulated vacuum energy as a sum of supercharge norms, giving nonnegative density; the scalar potential of supergravity instead includes a negative gravitational term.
For the equation , the second-order forward difference has Fourier symbol . The nonpositive real part gives a contractive semidiscrete evolution in the discrete L2 norm. Equivalently, for the unitary lattice shift , . A centred difference in another direction contributes only a skew-adjoint term, preserving this energy estimate.
The upper unitriangular group is generated by adjacent elementary transvection matrices . Commuting a matrix with each such generator forces every entry above the diagonal to vanish except possibly its entry: comparing with kills the entries above position in column and to the right of position in row . The surviving matrices do commute with the entire group. In particular the group center has order ; it distinguishes from despite their common order .
The upper Darboux integral of a bounded real function on a closed interval is the infimum of its upper Darboux sums over all partitions of an interval. Refinement decreases an upper Darboux sum, and the function is Riemann integrable precisely when this infimum agrees with its lower Darboux integral.
The lower Darboux integral of a bounded real function on a closed interval is the supremum of its lower Darboux sums over all partitions of an interval. Refinement increases a lower Darboux sum. A common refinement of two arbitrary partitions of an interval proves that every lower Darboux sum is at most every upper Darboux sum, hence the lower Darboux integral never exceeds the upper Darboux integral.
Hebbian learning by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-18
Activity-dependent strengthening associated with coactivation of an input and its postsynaptic output. The idealized update requires normalization, competition or other constraints to prevent indefinite weight growth.
In Hebbian memory weights for a Hopfield network, the local update records a pairwise association, where and . Equal signs strengthen a positive coupling; opposite signs favor a negative coupling. Summing such updates gives a symmetric matrix of pairwise associations. This is a storage prescription: it does not by itself compare the generated probability distribution with the training data, as Boltzmann machine learning does. Bipolar activity also makes joint inactivity contribute positively; this encoding is a mathematical idealization, not a literal statement about inactive biological cells.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
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    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
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