Math Memes

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Memes related to mathematics.

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Proof by fucking obviousness (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

Yeah, the four color problem becomes obvious to the brain if you try to place five territories on a plane (or a sphere) that are all adjacent to each other. (To require four colors, one of the territories has to be surrounded by the others)

But this does not make for a mathematical proof. We have quite a few instances where this is frustratingly the case.

Then again, I thought 1+1=2 is axiomatic (2 being the defined by having a count of one and then another one) So I don't understand why Bertrand Russel had to spend 86 pages proving it from baser fundamentals.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Then again, I thought 1+1=2 is axiomatic (2 being the defined by having a count of one and then another one) So I don't understand why Bertrand Russel had to spend 86 pages proving it from baser fundamentals.

Well, he was trying to derive essentially all of contemporary mathematics from an extremely minimal set of axioms and formalisms. The purpose wasn't really to just prove 1+1=2; that was just something that happened along the way. The goal was to create a consistent foundation for mathematics from which every true statement could be proven.

Of course, then Kurt Gödel came along and threw all of Russell's work in the trash.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Someone had to take him down a peg

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Smarmy git, strolling around a finite space with an air of pure arrogant certainty.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Saying it was all thrown in the trash feels a bit glib to me. It was a colossal and important endeavour -- all Gödel proved was that it wouldn't help solve the problem it was designed to solve. As an exemplar of the theoretical power one can form from a limited set of axiomatic constructions and the methodologies one would use it was phenomenal. In many ways I admire the philosophical hardball played by constructivists, and I would never count Russell amongst their number, but the work did preemptively field what would otherwise have been aseries of complaints that would've been a massive pain in the arse

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