• Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    20 hours ago

    That’s why we have the compound word “through-hole”.

    90% of important parts on living things are pockets and manipulations of surface area, two things completely ignored by topology. Topology is interesting mathematically, and has meaning for traversal and knot problems, but it’s not really useful to describe reality.

    • myslsl@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      10 hours ago

      but it’s not really useful to describe reality.

      This is just not true.

      What topology does for people practically, is it allows them to do a rough kind of geometric reasoning in a wide variety of cases. Further, the geometric notions defined via topology subsume many of the more intuitive notions you might already know of from the number line or the plane.

      For example, continuity of functions, convergence of sequences, interiors and boundaries of sets, connectedness and many other things are inherently topological notions that any person who has taken a typical calculus sequence should have some intuitive idea of.

      One of the biggest difference between actual pure topology and analysis is that analysis is just done in the context of really nice types of topological spaces called metric spaces in which notions of distance are available.

      Any time people are using results of calculus in the sciences, under the hood they are using details about topology on R^n.

    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      20 hours ago

      That’s why we have a diverse set of words such as “divot,” “indentation,” “pit,” “well,” and so much more!

      Topology is a component of the language called “mathematics” we use to understand, describe, and model reality in concrete terms.