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.
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.
Software Development: You bought a textbook?
Computer programming books … Lol we don’t print them any more, they’d be obsolete before hitting the shelves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Math is a thought game with axioms as rules. It’s much more stable since the rules are “self-evident”.
Fuck you professor, its a 35 line proof, and it isn’t as trivial as you think it is!
It’s actually a 36 line proof, so this question is wrong and you score a 50 on the test.
Professor = Bozo and therefore wrong Q.E.D.
I’m getting undergrad flashbacks. “It’s trivial so I won’t be going over it…”
That $300 stack of the cheapest thin paper was last semester. The online code you need for class is void, and the questions won’t match the answer key.
The really funny part is the other two are also just math.
The fabric of reality is woven from math, and that’s beautiful.
Math is just applied logic. Logic is just applied philosophy. Philosophy is just applied bullshit.
Good, I didn’t wanna learn calculus anyway
Calc 1 & 2 were fine for me. Calc 3 I either couldn’t get because I didn’t apply myself at all or my professor was terrible. 4 grades. 2 tests totaled 95% of our grade, 2 quizzes that equaled 5%. Got a 100 on the first quiz they said to use as a “progress report”. Got a 60 on the first test. Clearly the quiz wasnt a good way to tell my progress.
Weird flex
You could make the same argument for things like mathematics before the discovery about imaginary numbers.
Ehh imaginary numbers added to the scope of mathematics it didn’t take away anything other than no’s.
No, it changed things like “how many roots does x² + 2x + 2 have” from “none” to “two”.
The answer to that question didn’t change, what changed is how you might interpret the question.
If I asked “what are the REAL roots of x² + 2x + 2” the answer is still “none”. And prior to imaginary numbers being widely used, that is how the question would have been understood.
Mathematics involves making choices about what set of rules we’re working with. If you don’t allow the concept of negative numbers, the equation “x+1=0” has no solution. If you give me an apple, then I have no apples, how many apples did I have before? The question describes an impossible situation, and that’s a perfectly valid way to view it.
Different sets of rules can change what’s possible but don’t invalidate conclusions based on other sets of rules. We just need to specify what set of rules we’re working with.
My entire point is that before they weren’t saying “real” versus “imaginary”. You’re proving my point. In the other fields mentioned you could make the same argument about the interpretation changing but the book still being useful.
The other fields are attempting to describe reality. While Newtonian physics is useful, as an approximation, it’s also quite clearly wrong. You can imagine a universe which follows those rules but it’s not this universe, and that’s why it’s wrong. Mathematics doesn’t care about this universe, so you can pick whatever rules you want. Imaginary numbers are not “more accurate”, they don’t invalidate any previous understanding. They are an imaginary concept with interesting properties. For mathematics, that’s enough.
Imaginary numbers are not “more accurate”, they don’t invalidate any previous understanding. They are an imaginary concept with interesting properties. For mathematics, that’s enough.
No. Imaginary numbers have the worst name. Like the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment it was something meant to mock the concept originally but stuck once real applications were found. Imaginary and complex numbers describe very real processes in nature and are not just some weird artifact of trying to get the square root of a negative number.
Here is an interesting video on the topic that also covers some of the applications used to describe things in nature. https://youtu.be/cUzklzVXJwo
If you prefer text here is an article listing some. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/maths/applications-of-imaginary-numbers-in-real-life/
Imaginary numbers have the worst name.
I agree, because really all numbers are imaginary. Numbers are also wonderfully useful for describing nature, and it’s amazing how what might start as a quest for completeness and elegance ends up reflecting something about the real world. Each extension on our use of numbers is an augmentation, an extended toolkit to solve different problems, but doesn’t negate anything which went earlier. For example finding the roots of a polynomial often represents a problem where complex solutions aren’t applicable, and “no solution” is the more meaningful result. One kind of mathematics may be bigger and more complete than another, but that doesn’t make it better or more true. It just depends on what you need from it.
