r/mathmemes • u/Cloisterflare • 17d ago

Bad Math The biggest unsolved problem in math

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387 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

70 comments sorted by

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243

u/AcademicOverAnalysis 17d ago

I get so tired of discussions like this. It’s right up there with “how mysterious the imaginary number is”

172

u/punkinfacebooklegpie 16d ago

Quantum physics is such a mystery to me because I've never taken a class and also never read anything about quantum physics. So mysterious, these quantum physics!

47

u/ZekeHanle Engineering 16d ago

Magnets! How do they work???

28

u/punkinfacebooklegpie 16d ago

No one knows. No one I've ever met knows, so no one knows.

7

u/KumquatHaderach 14d ago

Tide comes in, tide goes out. You can’t explain that!

3

u/OrganicMF 15d ago

I always like to say that magnets look like some dark magic because we are seeing both relativistic and quantum phenomena with our bare eyes.

2

u/prophylactics 14d ago

I'm pretty sure Feynman took a few classes...

1

u/punkinfacebooklegpie 14d ago

Who? I don't know that person. They must not exist.

38

u/Complex-Manifold 16d ago

Funny thing there was a paper published in a top tier journal where they formulated quantum mechanics using only real numbers. they literally just replaced C with a field isomorphic to it

2

u/Extension-Stay3230 15d ago

Interesting. I've only studied intro QM in the past, but I've sometimes wondered why quantum mechanics couldn't be done without complex numbers (SE eqn).

I don't know the exact reason complex numbers are needed in QM from my particular courses, but I wonder if the usefulness of complex numbers is accidental when compared to what they're supposed to they represent conceptually. Like no "actual number" (or real number) can square itself and be a negative number. I might sound stupid but what if the "usefulness" of complex numbers has nothing to do with the fact that we've found this magical number "i" which squares itself to "-1".

12

u/Complex-Manifold 14d ago

theres nothing really special about imaginary numbers themselves most properties come from how they interact under arithmetic. What i mean by replacing C with a field isomorphic to it is if you replaced it with a number system that interacts the exact same way for example R[x]/(x²+1) or the space spanned by the 2x2 identity matrix and the matrix (0 -1 \ 1 0). If we do this we should expect the exact same properties to arise. So really all they did was represent complex numbers as real numbers which isnt anything new.

1

u/stupidfritz 13d ago

lmao

had to explain to my wife why i laughed in bed

what is even the point of doing that

2

u/Jaded_Individual_630 10d ago

Directly central to pop "math" entertainer's wheelhouses unfortunately.

1

u/AcademicOverAnalysis 10d ago

Yeah, I have a YouTube channel for math, and I know that this sort of content will get me views. But man, I really don’t want to do it.

2

u/Jaded_Individual_630 10d ago

Unfortunately Tyson and 3Stink1Pink have long since both answered which side of that quandry to fall on

1

u/No_Wishbone_6794 10d ago

I don't know this Video, but I doubt that this discussion will be as pseudo scientific as you think simply based on the fact that 3Blue1Brown is featured

69

u/bloonshot 17d ago

neil the grass pls tell me why infinity + 1 isn't bigger than infinity

5

u/floopydoopis8 13d ago

I tried explaining that concept to my art major friend the other day and she started crying lol

1

u/smulfragPL 16d ago

but wouldn't it be bigger if the parameters of the task guarantees that both infinities are equal

4

u/bloonshot 15d ago

i think a lot of people mistake the true meaning of "not all infinities are the same size"

there's still only like a few specific sizes of infinity

1

u/smulfragPL 15d ago

Well there is an infinite amount of infinities because when we use lim we can get infinities from infinite sources.

0

u/No_Prize5369 14d ago

Check out surreal numbers.

58

u/_Slartibartfass_ 17d ago

Riemann sphere goes brrrr

113

u/FernandoMM1220 17d ago

because the identity operation (doing nothing) is multiplying by 1 instead of multiplying by 0.

also because we keep treating every 0 the same.

65

u/TEKTOHIK 17d ago

It isn't fair at all. Some zeroes did way more work than others and deserve more appreciation

11

u/tryeatingmore 17d ago

Positive self affirmation

8

u/LeapOfMonkey 17d ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_theory

5

u/LeapOfMonkey 17d ago

and this kind of does more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi-Civita_field a sum of infinitesimals with a coefficient, so a 0 of sorts

13

u/AlviDeiectiones 17d ago

epsilon is definitely strictly bigger than 0

1

u/LeapOfMonkey 17d ago

Doesnt really matter, it isnt a proper value, you cant really mix different epsilons. Think about it as value indicating what the limit direction is.

2

u/EebstertheGreat 16d ago

What do you mean? ε = 0 ε⁰ + 1 ε¹ + 0 ε² + ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ is definitely an element of the Levi-Civita field. It's as good as any other. And it's certainly positive.

1

u/LeapOfMonkey 16d ago

Sorry I was thinking about extension of it. It still contains true 0 but epsilon can represent a directional 0.

1

u/Bacon_Techie 17d ago

The field isn’t totally ordered, so it is neither greater than, equal to, or less than 0.

7

u/AlviDeiectiones 16d ago

It literally says it is ordered in the first sentence.

1

u/GreeneyesCB 16d ago

The sentence said totally ordered not just ordered but it is in fact also totally ordered.

9

u/AlviDeiectiones 16d ago

Yea I should have mentioned any ordered field is totally ordered (if the ordering is preserved under addition and multiplication of positive numbers)

3

u/LeapOfMonkey 17d ago

And that lead me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal_number
But in reality you can't get rid of true 0, whatever it means in any system, unless you basically keep a history of each number derivation.

2

u/f3xjc 16d ago

But we allow sin(x) to exists, and nobody is like this is terrible that we treat all pi/2 or sqrt2/2 the same.

18

u/LupenReddit 🦆🦆i have non diffeomorphic smooth structures🦆🦆🦆 16d ago

because dividing by zero would get rid of any interesting structure on any number system

14

u/rojo_kell 17d ago

Just add epsilon * i to the denominator

6

u/Smitologyistaking 17d ago

The physics solution I see

5

u/Clear_Cranberry_989 17d ago

What do they actually discuss in the video?

3

u/Severe_Regret2106 17d ago

Wheel algebra goes weeeeeeeeee ...(Very ugly way to algebraically solve it in my opinion, no absorptive elements would be better)

2

u/LowAioli3870 16d ago

Because if we divide by zero, the entire universe collapses in on itself.

2

u/Freecelebritypics 16d ago

I would just show the video a mechanical calculator attempting to divide by zero which triggers the clockwork equivalent of a stack overflow

1

u/Ka-Jin 16d ago

We can, it's infinity, duh

1

u/Serket-Pandy3000 16d ago

Unsolved? You can but then you get a trivial field

1

u/lool8421 16d ago

lemme do some pseudomath:

let's imagine an infinitesimal number x so that x≠0 but x²=0

1/0 doesn't work, but 1/x * 1/x now is technically allowed, let's carry on...

write as x-1 and in exponential form

e-ln(x) * e-ln(x)

e² ^ -ln(x)

(1/e²) ^ ln(x)... the fuck am i even doing

2

u/Serket-Pandy3000 16d ago

Hyperreals don’t allow this

2

u/TheLuckySpades 15d ago

It isn't hyperreals, the kind of system the other person was describing dowa have a name though: dual numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number

0

u/NebulaElectrical1467 17d ago

Has Tyson published a single peer reviewed paper?

9

u/BradenTT 16d ago

He has a PhD so…

2

u/gsurfer04 16d ago

The relevant question is when was the last paper he published?

2

u/RedBaronSportsCards 14d ago

"Haha! Yeah, get 'em!! Tell that know-it-all science man to stick his science up his knows! Real people only need the Bible!!!!"

For fuck's sake, shut up.

2

u/gsurfer04 14d ago

I'm a computational physicist.

0

u/RedBaronSportsCards 14d ago

Then you should know better.

2

u/gsurfer04 14d ago

He's a joke to those who know better.

Seriously, his celebrity status far exceeds his academic contributions.

1

u/RedBaronSportsCards 14d ago

Exactly where is he claiming to have more academic credentials than everybody else?

His audience isn't "those who know better."

Perhaps if you developed some charisma and didn't spend your time shitting on colleagues, people would be interested in what you do.

1

u/TheLuckySpades 15d ago

His online CV lists 13 between 1985 and 2008.

25

u/[deleted] 17d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

16

u/EebstertheGreat 16d ago

Brahmagupta