Throughout my three years of calculus I was just continuously thinking “someone came up with this shit on their own? In the 1600s? HOW!?!!”
2 Likes
“get by” is doing a lot of work there. We can strive for better.
My biggest/favorite mind-blowing moment when I was learning math was when I was shown this video by one of our teachers. Dude from ancient Egypt was able to accurately calculate the circumference of the Earth. Also Carl Sagan is still amazing to listen to.
4 Likes
I think this particular time period is bringing out the worst in all of us. Seriously this sucks a lot and I’ll be the first to admit that right now I’m not doing so good. My wife filled her first prozac prescription this morning. We’ve been doing a good job on eating better lately, but the last 2-3 days the wheels just came off the wagon…
Yeah it is what it is. Simp is probably doing a better job of dealing with all of this if he’s being a bit more abrasive than usual on this forum instead of what I’m doing.
9 Likes
Any solid that goes straight up in the air without getting fatter or thinner has a volume equal to the area of the base times the height. Obviously. For many years my intelligence ranking has perpetuated a great fraud upon the public. I am besides myself.
I heard that David Sklansky was so brilliant at math that he could’ve gotten a Field’s medal but simply didn’t consider it worth his time. Instead he focused his efforts on 538 riddles, SAT math competitions, and thought experiments in an online poker forum. He also came up with the Fundamental Theorem of Poker. A theorem which is so difficult to prove that he figured no one else could possibly understand the proof so he omitted it altogether.
9 Likes
That awkward moment when what you thought was contemporary architecture turns out to be the wreckage of extreme weather.
5 Likes
The next great opera house has been inspired.
https://twitter.com/aIeturner/status/1298372968838508546
I don’t get it, why is she being mocked for espousing a reasonably defensible philosophical view? “Math isn’t real” is just about literally what mathematical nominalists believe. You can read about mathematical nominalism here (and about mathematical fictionalism here). These views may not be ultimately right, but they’re not trivial to refute, and they’re certainly beyond the ignorant contemptuousness of the twitter hoi polloi.
This also brushes up against the topic of nonexistent objects, which is a very pleasant irony because there’s no firm historical evidence that Pythagoras ever existed, so calling him Pythagrias is just elite trolling by her.
Frankly, this is a pretty gross twitter dragging of a promising young mind, and it’s attributable to the cultural predominance of a kind of patriarchal and under-scrutinized Platonism that would have us worship invisible realities instead of coming to terms with the fact that humans are making shit up about 100% of the time. You can read more about this phenomenon here.
4 Likes
Yeah, my reaction was similar.
Math is beautiful. I pity people who can’t appreciate it. That’s like being blind.
3 Likes
I agree with what people are saying about some maths such as trig being unnecessary for most people, but to reduce education down to its utilitarian essentials misses this point about the beauty inherent in a lot of maths.
(You could equally argue that some other subjects kids are taught are superfluous and should be ditched in favour of things which will be of practical value, so goodbye Shakespeare, chemistry and biology too.
It doesn’t leave us with very much apart from a culturally barren generation.)
Best wishes to you both.
https://twitter.com/graciegcunning/status/1298804338727489536?s=19
I’m kinda anti- how she frames her “deep” math questions but she’s cute, so it’s basically a tie.
Here’s a good resource that addresses some of her questions, especially regarding methodology and proof in early mathematics. Descartes’ Mathematics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
One of the early debates about calculus was over the addition of infinitesimals and other dodgy moves. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0315086089900190/pdf?md5=0d3fe59ae75cb99aa71c4b453cb3ce7a&pid=1-s2.0-0315086089900190-main.pdf (pdf)
More explicitly regarding infinitesimals:
The concept of infinitesimal was beset by controversy from its beginnings. The idea makes an early appearance in the mathematics of the Greek atomist philosopher Democritus c. 450 B.C.E., only to be banished c. 350 B.C.E. by Eudoxus in what was to become official “Euclidean” mathematics. We have noted their reappearance as indivisibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: in this form they were systematically employed by Kepler, Galileo’s student Cavalieri, the Bernoulli clan, and a number of other mathematicians. In the guise of the beguilingly named “linelets” and “timelets”, infinitesimals played an essential role in Barrow’s “method for finding tangents by calculation”, which appears in his Lectiones Geometricae of 1670. As “evanescent quantities” infinitesimals were instrumental (although later abandoned) in Newton’s development of the calculus, and, as “inassignable quantities”, in Leibniz’s. The Marquis de l’Hôpital, who in 1696 published the first treatise on the differential calculus (entitled Analyse des Infiniments Petits pour l’Intelligence des Lignes Courbes ), invokes the concept in postulating that “a curved line may be regarded as being made up of infinitely small straight line segments,” and that “one can take as equal two quantities differing by an infinitely small quantity.”
However useful it may have been in practice, the concept of infinitesimal could scarcely withstand logical scrutiny. Derided by Berkeley in the 18th century as “ghosts of departed quantities”, in the 19th century execrated by Cantor as “cholera-bacilli” infecting mathematics, and in the 20th roundly condemned by Bertrand Russell as “unnecessary, erroneous, and self-contradictory”, these useful, but logically dubious entities were believed to have been finally supplanted in the foundations of analysis by the limit concept which took rigorous and final form in the latter half of the 19th century. By the beginning of the 20th century, the concept of infinitesimal had become, in analysis at least, a virtual “unconcept”.
Continuity and Infinitesimals (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
1 Like
Trig teacher may have been my best HS teacher. Came in, sat down, and he’d do 50 minutes of blackboard work, very conceptual.
Took AP calc but also more advanced calc in college taught by a new Chinese asst prof with an impenetrable accent from an equally impenetrable text (by a prof in the department). Killed whatever limited interest I had in progressing further in math.
1 Like
via BoingBoing
https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1298654533158146049
“Build back better—BBB. If you were going to imagine ‘666’ and you wanted to show it to people and disguise it at the same time, can you think of any letter that the numeral six would fit inside completely? Only capital B,” Adams said.
Even Joe Biden’s name, Adams said, has a satanic coincidence.
“Did you know if you took the capital letter J—just imagine the capital letter J in your mind—now think of the next letter in ‘Joe.’ It’s an O. Now just move with your mind the O to the left until it’s on top of the J. It’s a backward six,” Adams said. “Now suppose the next letter is the lowercase E. What does a lowercase E look like if you turn it upside down? Well, it looks like a six.”
He continued, “So you’ve got the J and O together. If you combine them it looks like a backward six. You’ve got this lowercase E that looks like an upside-down six, but that’s just two sixes. Six, six wouldn’t mean anything, right? But the next letter is capital B for Biden, and capital B is where you hide your six. So even J-O-E-B is 666.”
He surmised that the letters I, D, E, and N left in Biden’s last name is short for “identity.”
“666 identity. That’s what Joe Biden’s name actually is,” Adams said.
Lots of people like the idea that women are dumb. They are likely to view this through a confirmation bias lens.
Without math, we wouldn’t have Pi.
Totally worth it IMO
1 Like