# A LaTeX version of Mumford’s impression of Spec Z[x], or some TikZ tricks

reminds me of the xkcd style graphs competition on stackexchange

Notice: The post An atlas of the affine line over the integers and the page An atlas for $latex \mathrm{Spec}\,\mathbb{Z}[x]$ might be interesting if you came here by your favourite search engine.

As promised on Twitter I decided to draw a TeX version of Mumford’s drawing of an elusive object: $latex \mathrm{Spec}\,\mathbb{Z}[x]$

This can be considered as the first non-trivial example in scheme theory. Mumford’s treasure map tries to depict how we could (but we can’t or shouldn’t for a myriad of reasons) visualize its geometry. The meaning behind it, as found in the mimeographed notes named The Red Book, is discussed thoroughly at neverendingbooks.org’s series on Brave New Geometries.

So in case you don’t know the drawing, we’re talking about

The entire series (and by extension the weblog) is a must-read for every math student by the way! As a matter of fact, it was the strangeness and…

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