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arXiv · 1612.06820

Reflections in a cup of coffee

Raf Bocklandt
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Abstract

Allegedly, Brouwer discovered his famous fixed point theorem while stirring a cup of coffee and noticing that there is always at least one point in the liquid that does not move. In this paper, based on a talk in honour of Brouwer at the University of Amsterdam, we will explore how Brouwer's ideas about this phenomenon spilt over in a lot of different areas of mathematics and how this eventually led to an intriguing geometrical theory we now know as mirror symmetry.

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Raf Bocklandt. 2016-12-20. Reflections in a cup of coffee. https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.06820

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