Presymplectic form by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
A presymplectic form is a closed two-form, commonly assumed to have constant rank, that need not be nondegenerate. A symplectic form is its nondegenerate special case. Its kernel distribution is integrable: for kernel fields , the identity gives . If the characteristic leaf quotient is smooth and the form descends, that quotient has a symplectic form. A regular Hamiltonian energy hypersurface carries such a form with kernel spanned by its Hamiltonian vector field.
Real symmetric spectral orthogonality by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
A real symmetric matrix is a Hermitian matrix, so is real for every complex vector . If is an eigenvector, its eigenvalue is and is real. Then gives . Reality is used in changing conjugate transpose to transpose; complex symmetry alone does not imply real eigenvalues.
Two real symmetric matrices are coaxial when they share an orthonormal eigenbasis. Equivalently they commute. Degenerate eigenspaces can have several choices of shared axes.
A real symmetric matrix is positive definite when its quadratic form is positive on every nonzero vector. By the spectral theorem, this is equivalent to all its eigenvalues being positive. It has a unique symmetric positive-definite square root.
Axis decomposition of a symmetric matrix by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
Fix , put , , and . Any real symmetric matrix on three-dimensional Euclidean space has a unique decomposition with , and :
The transverse restriction is a symmetric two-dimensional matrix, whose traceless matrix part has dimension two. Together the two scalars, two components of and two components of give the six parameters of .
Complex symmetric nilpotent matrix by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-18
The displayed nonzero matrix is symmetric under transpose but not Hermitian. It is nilpotent, so all its eigenvalues are zero and it cannot be diagonalizable. Thus real-symmetric spectral conclusions require reality or a Hermitian hypothesis; complex transpose symmetry alone is insufficient.
Use the sequential convention and define by . The symmetric Hessian of a scalar field gives symmetry in , but the curvature commutator on a covariant tensor gives . Averaging the three distinct permutations yields . Thus a scalar's third covariant derivative is not generally totally symmetric.
The coefficient of in counts distinct rearrangements of the parts of whose prefix-sum set contains the prefix sums of . Indeed, Hall inner product of symmetric functions duality between turns this coefficient into times the coefficient of in . Expanding expresses each as a signed sum of compositions of . Concatenating these compositions gives precisely the counted rearrangements, and every sign is .
A subshift of finite type is a closed subset of a finite-alphabet full shift defined by finitely many forbidden finite words, with the restricted left shift. After replacing symbols by sufficiently long blocks, its constraints can be described by a zero-one symbolic transition matrix. In this presentation, membership means that every consecutive pair follows an allowed transition. The resulting sequence space is a compact metric space and the restricted left shift is a homeomorphism.
Sweat gland by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
A sweat gland is a skin gland delivering secretion to the surface or a related follicular route. Eccrine glands are important in human evaporative cooling. Gland activation, fluid transport and environmental evaporation are separate determinants of the cooling achieved.
Suppose an unobserved class has probabilities and , with hazard functions and , and set , . For an independently right-censored observation , its survival-parameter likelihood contribution is
This sums the two class-specific likelihoods before taking a logarithm. All hazards must be nonnegative. A common parameter-free censoring mechanism factors out; class-specific censoring instead alters the mixture weights and cannot silently be discarded.
Airy wave theory by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
Airy wave theory linearizes the motion of small-amplitude surface gravity waves in an inviscid, incompressible, irrotational fluid. At depth , its dispersion relation is ; deep water is the limit .
Radiation stress by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
The excess depth-integrated, time-averaged momentum flux of a surface gravity wave is its radiation stress. In deep water , so . The force per transverse width on a reflecting object is the incident plus reflected minus transmitted radiation stress. Reflection increases force because the reflected wave carries momentum in the opposite direction.
Power-law near-shore ray asymptotics by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
For depth with , stationary surface gravity waves conserve frequency and alongshore wavenumber . Near shore their dispersion becomes , so . The shoreward ray has , giving the displayed integrated scaling. Rays approach normally, while equal-phase crests approach parallel to the shore and their shore-normal spacing shrinks as . These are asymptotics within the ray approximation; for , its slow-variation assumption eventually fails arbitrarily close to the endpoint.
For a tank with side lengths , depth , impermeable walls and negligible surface tension, the small-amplitude surface gravity wave normal modes have horizontal factors and . The velocity potential has vertical factor , satisfying the bottom Neumann boundary condition. Combining the linearized free-surface boundary conditions gives . The uniform surface elevation is excluded when the total water volume is fixed. Taking one horizontal index zero gives the two-dimensional tank modes.
For , the shallow-water approximation gives ; for , the deep-water gravity wave relation follows. An oscillating-wall forcing of a rectangular tank couples to these same normal modes and becomes resonant at their natural frequencies.
Surface-wave breaking by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
A surface gravity wave breaks when its smooth free-surface motion becomes unstable and overturns or forms a strongly dissipative front. In the nondispersive shallow-water approximation, intersecting compressive characteristic curves signal failure of a smooth simple wave; a hydraulic bore replaces it at the integral-model level. Dispersion can instead produce an oscillatory bore, while physical breaking involves turbulence and energy loss beyond the inviscid equations.
An optically thin spherical source with volume emissivity has surface brightness
Substitute in the line-of-sight integral and evaluate using the beta function. The condition is convergence at large distance. A core or finite outer boundary changes the projection near that boundary; the stated scaling applies between those scales.
Sérsic profile by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
A Sérsic profile models projected galactic light, with index controlling curvature and chosen so that encloses half the luminosity. Its logarithmic slope is . The case is exponential; gives the traditional de Vaucouleurs form. Unlike a fixed power law, its slope steepens outward.
In light-cone coordinates on two-dimensional Minkowski spacetime, add two real odd Grassmann variables . With left Grassmann derivatives, the supercharges and supersymmetric covariant derivatives can be represented as
The identity gives , , , and for every . A Lorentz boost acts as , . Thus have boost weights , and is a Lorentz scalar. Since it commutes with both supercharges, an equation for an even scalar superfield is Lorentz invariant and supersymmetry covariant.
Kappa symmetry by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
A local fermionic gauge symmetry of supersymmetric brane actions. Since the kappa symmetry projector has half rank, the symmetry removes half the embedding fermions. The remaining physical fermions pair with the bosonic worldvolume degrees of freedom.

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
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    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
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
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