Easy as
I/II= ,V(OK, that was confusing, it’s
I/II= .Vin barbaric` )As a kid I thought Pythagoras was silly for making a math cult. Now that I’m older I get it.
That’s an interesting angle on it, can you say more? Sorry to be obtuse.
Well Pythagoras lived during the Greek era. Buildings like the Temple of Artemis were the greatest projections of power and grandeur the world had to offer at the time. Those great structures would’ve dwarfed anything seen out in the country. The only way those buildings could ever be erected is with the help of mathematics.
Furthermore mathematical truths are about as true as anything can be in the world. A triangle’s angles are always perfectly in harmony for instance. Way back when, when the world was much darker and more chaotic, those mathematical truths must’ve seemed like a great light in the darkness.
Mathematics is applicable truth.
Computer programming books … Lol we don’t print them any more, they’d be obsolete before hitting the shelves.
Do be fair, that’s less because the fundamentals behind programming are changing and more because the specific implementations are changed all the damn time.
Yep, I got that “introduction to algorithms” (1100 pages tightly written, love it) and it still holds up ofc. I should have stayed in uni…
Mathematics teacher: That textbook was written thousands of years ago, and it is still as useful and relevant as ever, but I want you to buy this one I co-authored instead for the mere sum of $120, otherwise you won’t pass.
Conflict of interest detected
This really happened?
I took an environmental science class in college, and the professor was a former president of Shell. As part of the curriculum, we had to read his book, Why we Hate the Oil Companies. Predictably, it’s a corporate non-apologia, which—hilariously—completely avoids engaging with why we actually hate the oil companies.
environmental science class … the professor was a former president of Shell
Do they also invite Nazis to teach the elective in human rights?
Iirc, it was an energy/environment focus, so it was all about analyzing and comparing different energy sources wrt their usefulness, feasability, environmental impact, etc. This was in Houston, so the oil industry plays a huge role in the local economy, and funds the university endowments.
But yeah, the whole thing was pretty farcical.
Did people stand up to call the bullshit? I guess in this kind of situation you feel threatened that if you talk, you get penalized heavily
Not that I recall. I didn’t know anyone else in the class, and I don’t remember anything coming up in the class group chat. I did get quite heated with him at a couple of points, but I’m pretty sure he still gave me an A.
Not the original commenter, but I briefly had one professor in college that did that (their book was $50, though). It was an elective course for me, fortunately. I was able to switch for a different class that fit the same requirement without being forced to buy a book the professor wrote.
I admit I exaggerated a bit. It hasn’t happened to me, but I’ve had some teachers that strongly suggested buying their textbooks and frowned if you didn’t.
Fucking disgusting behavior
Programming: that book was printed a month ago, and it’s already obsolete.
Newspapers printed yesterday are already in the bin.
Tiktok posts last seconds before being discarded.
Science is validated by the new information replacing the old. Al-Khwarizmi worked out numbers so we don’t have to,
Wrong for physics. Models to describe reality don’t magically become wrong just because a model with better predictive power is discovered. Most old models are special cases of newer ones.
Yeah, Newton wasn’t just a science bitch who is wrong, sometimes. His equations are the special case of General Relativity when acceleration is very low. Which is the world we live in.
Oh that book is outdated. That’s the second edition, you need the third addition to complete the one math problem I am basing your entire grade on for the course.
“Why yes I do happen to also be the author of the textbook for this course, why do you ask?”
Religious Texts: … that text was written by some half literate guy living in a desert who heard tenth hand folk stories from his community from people who had died about a hundred years before his time, mixed in with legends, myths and fairy tales that are thousands of years old … but it’s all true because it came from God, believe it or you will burn in hell forever.
You, a loser Christian, reading from a 2000 year old book of morality fables.
Me, a sophisticated Scientologist, reading from a 70 year old Sci-Fi/fad health trilogy.
Maybe L. Ron Hubbard was a time traveller that had already started everything 3,000 years ago and decided to restart it all again 70 years ago.
Or maybe he just copied the successful indoctrination practices of existing religions…
Maybe the real religion was the profit we made along the way.
Always was
The hypocrisy of any religious book being the words of their all powerful master while they give themselves the option to cherry pick which rules they wish to follow is astounding.
It’s one of the first things that convinced kid me that it’s all made up bullshit to control gullible people.
The funny part that is … which book are you talking about? … Christian bible? Jewish Tanakh? Islamic Koran? … and if its Christian - is it just the Old Testament? New Testament? … which version of the Christian bible? - King James? New Standard? English Standard? Anglican? Baptist? Lutheran? Methodist? Presbyterian? Roman Catholic? Mormon? Protestant?
Mormons use the King James version. Or at least used to. Wouldn’t surprise me if they started rewriting their own version, though… it’s kinda’ 99% of religions’ MO.
Whichever one best justifies the lifestyle and decisions.
I don’t see any difference between cults. It’s all a way to control uneducated people with fake magical thinking and the threat of eternal damnation.
Same here … and they’re all cults as far as I’m concerned
The only difference between a cult and a religion is time
Time and mass acceptance
well the joke is that each book claims to be written by God
Yes
Don’t forget about all the apocrypha.
I reminded your mom of the apocrypha last night, if you know what I mean…
And don’t worry, it definitely wasn’t completely written a thousand years later to push the preferred political agendas of the time.
That wouldn’t be true for Christianity as 3 of the 4 Gospels were cribbing off the 4th one. Heck the Gospel of John and the Revelation unto John were written by at least two different people and the Revelation likely was included at the Council of Nicea because they both had John in the name. Christianity would be very different without revelations.
The prevailing consensus is that the gospels of Matthew and Luke were cribbing from the gospel of Mark and a text that is lost to us that is referred to as Q. The gospel of John is original as far as we know.
Also, a lot of the Pauline epistles weren’t even written by Paul.
Q: How can you tell if a Lemming is an atheist?
A: Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
You saw a meme about science and math and your first thought was “how can I make this about religion”?
excuse me, but this is a meme about history and religious mythology is definitely a big part of history
I would just expect someone who doesn’t like religion to not want to have conversations about it, instead of bringing it up at every vaguely related opportunity.
sounds like you haven’t had much experience of having to sit through religious people spout bullshit at you every single day. it’s not the least bit surprising to me that it’s on someone’s mind. or maybe you just don’t understand why religion would matter to someone? even to challenge/deny it is to engage with its importance no?
sounds like you haven’t had much experience of having to sit through religious people spout bullshit at you every single day.
You mean like what’s happening in this thread? Someone had a joke that had nothing to do with religion, and here we are talking about religious bullshit because someone can’t let any opportunity pass without mentioning religion.
Again: if you’re tired of people spouting religious bullshit at you all day I would expect you to not try to steer even more conversations towards religion.
I didn’t steer shit, first of all. I’m not the one who posted the original comment. I’m just telling you to shut the fuck up. Let us enjoy our thing.
Second, do you really believe that if you just ignore things they go away? As if people are not out there bible thumping every single day? and we come in here and try to enjoy a moment of reflecting on the ridiculousness of those beliefs and you have to come in here and bitch about it. hence, I’m here to tell you to shut the fuck up.
I’m sorry if this comes across as rude, maybe cussing will send me to hell or whatever, but i really feel like your input has been the truly rude part of this conversation.
I didn’t steer shit, first of all.
First of all, never said or implied you did.
Let us enjoy our thing.
So you do enjoy bringing up religion in every possible conversation?
(and can I just point out the irony of you saying “let us enjoy our thing” when your thing it literally shitting on other people’s thing?)Second, do you really believe that if you just ignore things they go away?
Sir, this is a
Wendysmeme about math.As if people are not out there bible thumping every single day?
and we come in here and try to enjoy
a moment of reflecting on the ridiculousness of those beliefsmemes away from all that bullshit and someone has to come in here and bring it up to bitch about it anyway. hence, I’m here to tell them to shut the fuck up.i really feel like your input has been the truly rude part of this conversation.
My input has been the simple fact that people who insist on making every conversation about religion are fucking exhausting to everyone else.
I have not subbed to any religious or anti-religious communities, and yet people seem to think it needs to be a part of every discussion. You’d think out of all people atheists wouldn’t be the ones doing that shit yet here we are. If you want to talk about that shit go those communities and you will find plenty of like minded people.
I didn’t like covid either but I sure ranted at people online about it!
Do you reply to memes about video games with your thoughts on covid?
Only while the pandemic was killing millions. So I’m optimistic about this subject as well.
Reality: The universe was spontaneously created last thursday and there is no way for you to disprove it.
Nah mate, it was already in existence by last Tuesday afternoon and there is no way for you to disprove it.
Since you made the claim, the onus of proof is on you. Go on, it’ll be interesting to see your proof.
Web development: Oh, that textbook is obsolete. It was written last year before Angular v18 was released.
*French SpongeBob voice
“2 hours later”
Was just watching a kubernetes tutorial recorded a year ago, and the entire website / package repository it uses doesn’t exist anymore because modern devs can’t go six months without changing everything.
A colleague called it “Hype driven development” the other day and I have to say that describes it perfectly.
Whoops, 18.1 just released breaking changes
Laughs in PHP + HTML5 + CSS3 + Vanilla JS
My condolences
Why? It is much better than Fortran, the Industry standard of programming languages!
Laughs about PHP
Meanwhile you can still get away with most of what you learned in Java 1.4.
Electron was discovered in 1897. If you own a textbook on chemistry which is older than that, put it up on Ebay in the antiques category.
Newton lived in the 17th century, so if you got a textbook older than that give it back to the museum
I’ll drop it off for anyone if needed.
I’m very trustworthy.
Very.
I promise.
Theres a lovely scene in Star Trek where Picard is captured, then finds an exposed wire on the cell panel. He takes it and begins tapping out prime numbers, to show to the aliens’ mathematicians that they’re sentient and capable of thought, independent of language.
2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 39
39 is not a prime number
Out the airlock they go.
Philosopher to the right of the mathematician: “You’re welcome for the axioms”
Computer Scientists: Physics is just the application of discrete state machines.
The other way around. Computer Science studies the implications of physical laws - the relation between space and time, what’s ultimately knowable given the make ups of our universe, etc.
But math does change, and it has a lot in the last 1000 years.
Math doesn’t change, we just learn more about it.
The mathematical knowledge we had thousands of years ago is still true, and it always will be.
Math doesn’t change, we just learn more about it.
Isn’t that true of almost all the sciences?
The difference is that if something is proven mathematically it’s 100% certain and will not change. In other sciences you may be taught things that later turn out to be flat out wrong.
Bingo, I was taught in genetics class in the 1990s that RNA played a role but DNA was the primary driver and now my understanding is the current consensus is RNA is the primary driver.
When I was growing up, Minnie was the primary Driver, but now the consensus says that it’s Adam.
Not if it’s later shown that your set of axioms lead to a contradiction.
In that case have fun re-proofing everything with new axioms.
Not here to start shit, genuinely curious what people think about Gödel’s incompleteness theorems in relation to us being able to “know” math
Not a mathematician but the way I understand it, is that it merely shows that there are unprovable problems, not that nothing can be proven.
Sounds hella sus now that you mention it 🤔
Not quite. Science is empirical, which means it’s based on experiments and we can observe patterns and try to make sense of them. We can learn that a pattern or our understanding of it is wrong.
Math is inductive, which means that we have a starting point and we expand out from there using rules. It’s not experimental, and conclusions don’t change.
1+1 is always 2. What happens to math is that we uncover new ways of thinking about things that change the rules or underlying assumptions. 1+1 is 10 in base 2. Now we have a new, deeper truth about the relationship between bases and what “two” means.Science is much more approximate. The geocentric model fit, and then new data made it not fit and the model changed. Same for heliocentrism, Galileos models, Keplers, and Newtons. They weren’t wrong, they were just discovered to not fit observed reality as well as something else.
A scientific discovery can shift our understanding of the world radically and call other models into question.
A mathematical discovery doesn’t do that. It might make something more clear, easier to work with, or provide a technique that can be surprisingly applicable elsewhere.This is missing a lot of historical intrigues and “mistakes” in mathematics. Firstly, the way modern mathematical theorems and proofs are built up from axioms is relatively new (a couple hundred years or so). If you go back to Euclid, there are in fact contradictions that can be drawn from his work because he was defining his axioms inappropriately.
In more modern times we have discussions around the “axiom of choice”, and whole fields such as set theory and Fourier analysis faced some major hurdles in just being established.
My point is that math is constantly changing, also on a fundamental level, because new systems and axioms are being introduced. These rarely invalidate old systems, but sometimes they reveal a contradiction in terms that puts limitations on when some system is valid.
This is very similar to when Einstein developed a new framework for describing gravity: It didn’t “disprove” Newton in the sense that Newton’s laws still apply for all practical purposes in a huge range of situations, it just put clearer limits to when they apply and gave a more general explanation to why they apply.
You’re contradicting yourself.
What happens to math is that we uncover new ways of thinking about things that change the rules or underlying assumptions
Is no different than:
A scientific discovery can shift our understanding of the world radically and call other models into question.
Science isn’t changing, our understanding of it is. Same with math.
Those are entirely different. Peano developed a system for talking about arithmetic in a formalized way. This allowed people to talk about arithmetic in new ways, but it didn’t show that previous formulations of arithmetic were wrong. Godel then built on that to show the limits of arithmetic, which still didn’t invalidate that which came before.
The development of complex numbers as an extension of the real numbers didn’t make work with the real numbers invalid.When a new scientific model is developed, it supercedes the old model. The old model might still have use, but it’s now known to not actually fit reality. Relativity showed that Newtowns model of the cosmos was wrong: it didn’t extend it or generalize it, it showed that it was inadequately describing reality. Close for human scale problems but ultimately wrong.
And we already know relativity is wrong because it doesn’t match experimental results in quantum mechanics.Science is our understanding of reality. Reality doesn’t change, but our understanding does.
Because math is a fundamentally different from science, if you know something is true then it’s always true given the assumptions.There’s a difference between an advance that repudiates prior understanding and one that doesn’t. You can, in maths - and I assume this is the point - know that you are right, in a way that you can’t with a more… epistemological science. Of course it’s more complex than that, and a lot of maths is pretty sciency, like deriving approximate solutions for PDEs is more experimental than you might imagine, but even though we might make improvements there, we’ll never go ‘oh actually those error bounds are wrong’. They might be non optimal but they’ll never be wrong
A lot of sciences find core assumptions were not complete or based on the wrong thing. Health practices that have been around for millenia, like like food safety and sanitation, were successfully implemented using the wrong causes because they addressed the real causes. While they were not called science, they still used the same practices of comparing outcomes in the ways available at the time.
Bloodletting was originally to let out evil or something, then was used in formal medicine successfully but the cause it addressed was incorrect. Now we have much better ideas of how and when it helps to make it even more effective, but the underlying reasons and the methods changed completely.
Bloodletting is still a thing, but it’s called therapeutic phlebotomy.
Source: I have too much iron in my blood so I have to be bloodlet
yeah, and physics changes as a science because the actual physics of the universe changes. what are you on about. “we just learn more about it” is pretty much the definition of all sciences.
Has anything changed in Euclid’s Elements?
We discovered one of the postulates was really interesting to fuck with.
It’s better to say that we’ve discovered more math, some of which changes how we understand the old.
Since Euclid, we’ve made discoveries in how geometry works and the underpinnings of it that can and have been used to provide foundation for his work, or to demonstrate some of the same things more succinctly. For example, Euclid had some assumptions that he didn’t document.
Since math isn’t empirical, it’s rarely wrong if actually proven. It can be looked at differently though, and have assumptions changed to learn new things, or we can figure out that there are assumptions that weren’t obvious.
The number of hypotheses we’ve proven, mostly. Also, we have this whole field of non-Euclidean geometry. And the modern Pythagoreans are a lot more chill about people knowing the irrationality of Pi.
Yeah but I mean revision not additive change. From what I remember nothing in elements is wrong. I don’t think anyone proved that last postulate
Nothing is wrong, it’s just more incomplete than a modern book.
But if you’re at the 101 level, sure. It works fine.
Yes, some of the shit he wrote was basically meaningless (the “definitions” before the axioms) and we would just leave it out.
Not sure, I’ve only gotten to the middle of the third season. No spoilers, please!
Nope. Thats why I gifted it to my son, who studies math.
