What parts of a pure mathematics undergraduate curriculum have been discovered since $1964?$

Question

What parts of an undergraduate curriculum in pure mathematics have been discovered since, say, $1964?$ (I'm choosing this because it's $50$ years ago). Pure mathematics textbooks from before $1964$ seem to contain everything in pure maths that is taught to undergraduates nowadays.

I would like to disallow applications, so I want to exclude new discoveries in theoretical physics or computer science. For example I would class cryptography as an application. I'm much more interested in finding out what (if any) fundamental shifts there have been in pure mathematics at the undergraduate level.

One reason I am asking is my suspicion is that there is very little or nothing which mathematics undergraduates learn which has been discovered since the $1960s$, or even possibly earlier. Am I wrong?

Answer 1

Except for top university mathematics programs which have truly gifted undergraduates in them-such as Harvard, Yale or the University of Chicago-I seriously doubt undergraduates are exposed to truly modern breakthroughs in mathematics in any significant manner. Indeed, it's rare for first year graduate courses to contain any of this material in large doses!

This question reminds me of an old story my friend and undergraduate mentor Nick Metas used to tell me. When he was a graduate student at MIT in the early 1960's,he had a fellow graduate student who was top of his class as an undergraduate and published several papers before graduating. When he got to MIT, he refused to attend classes, feeling such "textbook work" was beneath him." This is all dead mathematics-I want to study living mathematics! Stop wasting my time with stuff from before World War I!" As a result, he had some really bizarre holes in his training. For example, he understood basic notions of algebraic geometry and category theory, but he didn't understand what the limit of a complex function was. As a result, not only did he fail his qualifying exams, his own presented research suffered greatly-he was always playing catch-up. Eventually, he dropped out and Nick never heard from him again. He always tells his students this story in order to make them understand something fundamental about mathematics-it's a subject that builds vertically, from the most basic foundations upward to not only more sophisticated results, but from the oldest to the most recent results.

This is why I think undergraduates simply can't be exposed to "recent" results-it takes until they're at least first year graduate students for a wide enough conceptual foundations to be erected in them to even begin to understand these concepts.

Answer 2

A ton of the most important theorems in graph theory are a decade away from the mark (Turáns theorem, Brook's theorem,)

Robertson-Seymour theorem has less than $40$ years. If you look for graph theory results you'll probably find a ton in that time which are taught in undergrad graph theory courses.

Answer 3

A lot of the important basic results of complexity theory postdate 1964. The most important example that comes to mind is that the formulation of NP-completeness didn't occur until the seventies; this includes the Cook-Levin theorem, which states that SAT is NP-complete (1971) and the identification of NP-completeness as something that was important and common to many natural computational problems (Karp 1972). These results certainly appear in an undergraduate course on computability and complexity.

Ladner's theorem, which would at least be mentioned in an undergraduate course, was proved in 1975.

(In contrast, the basic results of computability theory date to Turing, Post, Church, and Gödel in the 1930s.)

Answer 4

Graph theory is a relatively recent subject. Although the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem dates back as far as 1736, one of the first accepted textbooks on the subject was published by Harary in 1969, thirty years after Dénes Kőnig's 1936 work.

Many theorems were stated and proved in the last fifty years or so. For instance, the strong perfect graph theorem was conjectured in 1961 and was not proved until 2006 by Chudnovsky and al. The statement and the proof of the weaker version are often taught at the undergraduate level.

Answer 5

A lot of things connected to what is conventionally called the chaos theory. For example, it is quite accessible for undergraduates to prove that period three implies chaos.

(Li and Yorke published their paper in 1975. However, a more general result was given by Sharkovsky in 1964 (reprinted here), which still fits your question).

Answer 6

I taught students how to compute the Homfly polynomial in an undergrad topology course. This is an invariant for distinguishing inequivalent knots and links, and only goes back to 1985.

Answer 7

I taught undergraduates various primality testing and factorization algorithms (Pollard rho, quadratic sieve, elliptic curve methods) that were news in the 1970s and/or 1980s.

Answer 8

In CAGD (computer-aided geometric design), pretty much everything was developed after 1964. The fundamental concepts of Bézier curves and surfaces were developed by Bézier and de Casteljau in the early 1960's, and NURBS curves and surfaces didn't appear until Versprille's thesis in 1975.

CAGD is basically the study of the mathematics of free-form shapes, as used in design, engineering, manufacturing, entertainment, etc. Without it, you couldn't produce a modern car, airplane, ship, or even a high-end golf club. I expect some would argue that it's not really mathematics, though it's often taught in math departments, in both undergraduate and graduate classes. I don't suppose many people would consider it be "pure" mathematics, though it involves lots of (fairly old) algebraic and differential geometry. Personally, I do consider it to be pure/applied mathematics; the computer implementations are typically performed just to confirm that the mathematics is working correctly (and to make money, of course).

There is a bibliography of CAGD and related fields here. If you filter to isolate the works written prior to 1964, you'll see that there's not much.

Answer 9

Many of the things taught in an undergraduate Algorithms course were only discovered in the last 50 years (and nearly all in the last 100). For instance, A*, the foundation of all modern graph-searching algorithms, was discovered in 1968.

Another subject at the intersection of Math and Comp Sci which has been mostly developed in the last 50 years is Cryptography. For example, RSA (the popular public-key encryption algorithm, which relies on simple modular arithmetic) is taught early on in undergraduate Cryptography, yet was only created in the late 1970's.

Answer 10

I'm not sure if my answer qualifies, but here it is: as a second year student I took a course in mathematical logic, which included modal logic. Some of it predates the 60's, but many proofs are quite recent. Unfortunately, I'm not able to remember which proofs exactly, but given that Kripke only began to publish in the 60's, I'd imagine there ought to be more than one.

Also, if you are rather interested in what could be taught rather than what is actually taught, then, during my first year I was reading about cellular automata. The content was very easy to understand, so, I'd imagine if it was taught, that wouldn't pose a problem for students.

Answer 11

There are some not so old developments in the geometry of Banach spaces. They are typically mentioned in the functional analysis course.

Namely, in 1972 Per Enflo presented a famous example of a separable Banach space without Schauder basis. This space doesn't have an approximation property (i.e. there are compact operators in it which are not limits of finite dimensional operators).

In 1971 Lindenstrauss and Tzafriri proved that any Banach space not isomorphic to a Hilbert space has a closed subspace which cannot be complemented. In particular, you cannot have a continuous projection onto any closed subspace you like.

Answer 12

I nominate Carleson's theorem from 1962 (only two years too early), which is a must-mention (probably without a proof) in any Fourier analysis course now.

Note:it's pointed out that the year here is incorrect. The theorem was published in 1966.

Answer 13

I'm really surprised that noone has mentioned Apery's 1978 proof of the irrationality of $\zeta (3) $, which should be (and most of the time, is) mentioned in every book that touches this function.

Answer 14

Just a list of some theorems I have learned as an undergraduate student.

(1) $(U^*)$ Morely's Categoricity Theorem: 1965; Model Theory -- This was technically a graduate course, but I believe all the students were undergrads.

(2) $(U)$ Ax-Grothendieck Theorem: 1968; Model Theory (or at least that's the context we learned the proof in).

(3) $(U)$ Mayer–Vietoris sequence; First appeared in print in 1952; Differential Manifolds.

(4) $(U)$ Representation Theory applied to Random Walks - This was engineered by Persi Diaconis, who began this line of work in 1974. This definately counts.

(5) $(R)$ Cell Decomposition Theorem/O-minimality is preserved under elementary equivalence; 1984-5: I learned this in a Reading and Research Course, so this might not count.

I will add to this list when I think of more results.

Key: $U \equiv$ Undergraduate Course; $U^* \equiv$ Graduate Course with mostly undergraduates; $R \equiv $ Reading and Research Course.

Answer 15

Since the dividing line between 'pure' and 'applied' is pretty arbitrary, optimization may or may not qualify. But there's plenty of very recent results there that are covered in introductory courses. Dantzig didn't publish the simplex algorithm until 1947, the KKT conditions was published in the fifties and the entire field was extremely under-developed until computers came along.

Answer 16

Solitons were discovered in 1965, and might appear in an undergratuade PDE course. (This may or may not count as "too applied" for this question, but basically it is a purely mathematical discovery.)

Answer 17

I have seen Lie superalgebras and groups to be taught in a ugrad course (somewhere - can't find the place now). Most of the foundations for Lie superalgebras were laid in the 70s by B Kostant.

Correct me if not true but graded rings and other graded structures popped out in the 50s (not before) and they can't be accused of being applied.

Answer 18

This is an old debate on whether or to what extent the undergraduate syllabus should be related to research, or reflect, and stimulate discussion on, the nature of mathematics, as understood by professionals. J.E.Littlewood in his book "A Mathematicians Miscellany" claimed his excellent result at Cambridge was little relevant to research. Many, including me, have found the transition from undergraduate to postgraduate a culture shock. I was fortunate to find eventually that my way into research was in writing, and then getting a good problem.

Some have even found that their undergraduate degree "taught me to hate mathematics" or that "the difficulty and inaccessability of the courses left me and my friends scarred". See also a little article Carpentry.

Texts in algebraic topology often ignore relevant work on groupoids developed since 1967: see this mathoverflow discussion.

Another area neglected is fractals; I believe every undergraduate should be given some information on the Hausdorff metric and its application to fractals, since the latter have had wide publicity, and the course on this can be lots of fun with wide applications, provided it emphasises in the first instance ideas rather than proofs.

On the other hand, undergraduate courses often fail to give any background or context to the study of our subject. So the linked article on The Methodology of Mathematics has just been revised and republished. There are more articles on my Popularisation and Teaching page.

I confess to have been shocked that our students usually did not know why the angle in semicircle is a right angle, and so did some Euclidean Geometry for a special course, introducing proof as having the purpose of showing something surprising and capable of development, so showing the intent of a theorem.