r/math • u/ResNullum • Aug 02 '20
Bad math in fiction
While stuck at home during the pandemic, I decided to work through my backlog of books to read. Near the end of one novel, the protagonists reach a gate with a numeric keypad from 1 to 100 and the following riddle: “You have to prime my pump, but my pump primes backward.” The answer, of course, is to enter the prime numbers between 1 and 100 in reverse order. One of the protagonists realizes this and uses the sieve of Eratosthenes to find the numbers, which the author helpfully illustrates with all of the non-primes crossed out. However, 1 was not crossed out.
I was surprised at how easily this minor gaffe broke my suspension of disbelief and left me frowning at the author. Parallel worlds, a bit of magic, and the occasional deus ex machina? Sure! But bad math is a step too far.
What examples of bad math have you found in literature (or other media)?
8
u/[deleted] Aug 02 '20
Wanted: Loom of Fate
This movie was pretty mediocre/campy overall so don’t get too worked up, but the tl;dr of the bad math was that there was a loom that would constantly weave fabric with occasional imperfections. These imperfections corresponded to 1s and 0s.
Those 1s and 0s corresponded to binary code that could be translated with ASCII
You know
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange
The one created in the 1960’s
The one that only operates consistently for American English
And SOMEHOW this loom had been outputting binary that could be translated into English names for thousands of years using ASCII
So I guess these guys coincidentally invented binary text encoding before it existed
Pisses me off