My name is Howard Cohl and am currently a Mathematician at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. In 2010, I graduated with a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Auckland, in Auckland, New Zealand. In addition to mathematics, I'm interested in web archives of mathematics, Astrophysics, Physics, Scientific Computing, cycling, walking, and many other things. My home page is at hcohl.sdf.org.
I already have a Ph.D. and M.S. in Physics which I obtained in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Prior to that my only University education was a B.S. in Astronomy and Astrophysics in the Dept. of Astronomy at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. I am a U.S. citizen, but have been traveling and voyaging, mostly dedicating my efforts toward my education and research interests. My research interests lie in various areas of Mathematical Physics.
I have contributed to and taken an active interest in the following Wikipedia articles.
Associated Legendre function -- Cyclide -- Green's function -- Green's function for the three-variable Laplace equation -- Heine's identity -- Separable partial differential equation -- 6-sphere coordinates -- Toroidal coordinates -- Whipple formulae
Eduard Heine -- Francis John Welsh Whipple -- Adrien-Marie Legendre
New Article
Pentaspherical coordinates
A kind of homogeneous coordinates for a point in complex inversive space. The numbers , not all zero, are connected by the relation
All points which satisfy a linear equation
are said to form a sphere, with coordinates . Two spheres and are orthogonal if , tangent if
If two spheres and intersect, the expression
measures the cosine of their angle (or the hyperbolic cosine of their inverse distance).
Setting , one obtains the analogous tetracyclic coordinates, which lead to circles instead of spheres.
Completely analogous constructions can be performed for spaces of higher dimensions, which give polyspherical coordinates. In the 4-dimensional case they are called hexaspherical coordinates. Polyspherical coordinates are used in conformal geometry in examining manifolds of figures.