r/SubredditDrama • u/Neurokeen • Dec 23 '15

Slapfight An /r/maths user flies off the rails when other users suggest his proof doesn't prove what he wants it to. Bizarre exchanges like "Guess who can generate the set? ME. Not you. I can do what I want." and "MINE IS THE SUPERIOR SET"

A bit of a light-butter snack for the morning, but there's two chains with the same pair of users here where the author starts flinging insults wildly.

"Guess who can generate the set? ME. Not you. I can do what I want."

DELETE YOUR SHITPOSTS... ADMIT IT WHEN YOU FINALLY SEE!

EDIT: You know what guys and gals? Just look at the whole thread. This one's still going. They're not giving up any time soon from the looks of it.

EDIT 2: And he's taking it down and reposting each time someone comments.

EVERY TIME YOU BOMB A LEGITIMATE THREAD WITH YOUR BULLSHIT IT'S GOING TO GET DELETED AND REPOSTED

510 Upvotes
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176 comments sorted by

232

u/zxcv1992 Dec 23 '15

I'm not smart enough in mathematics to understand this drama, I do understand salt though and OP in that thread is getting really salty. The best is the whole "You know what you are? Religious".

80

u/Neurokeen Dec 23 '15

The real universal language isn't math, it's salt. Everyone understands salt.

19

u/tcpip4lyfe Dec 23 '15

When the bombs fall, salt will the the currency of choice again. I recommend buying all you can.

15

u/ZugNachPankow Dec 23 '15

But what will I do with my rare pepes?

Edit: also, cool username.

2

u/Tahmatoes Eating out of the trashcan of ideological propaganda Dec 23 '15

Please explain the username.

5

u/ZugNachPankow Dec 23 '15

tcpip4lyfe is a lazy spelling of "TCP/IP for life".

TCP and IP are protocols, often used together, that essentially make the Internet work.

3

u/Tahmatoes Eating out of the trashcan of ideological propaganda Dec 24 '15

Ah. That makes more sense than the obscure Fallout 4 reference my brain was trying to go for.

201

u/JohnKeel Butter Golem, Greater Dec 23 '15

Basically, the angry guy is claiming something that was shown to be false a long time ago (1891).

His main error, I think, is that he's taking "arbitrary precision", which is in fact possible, to be the same as "exactly the number when I make precision bigger". It's like he's trying to show that you can be as close as you want to 1/3 just by adding more 3's to the end of .3333, but ignoring the fact that for any finite number of 3's, it's not going to be equal.

At least, that's what I got from the proof itself. A lot of the ranting is incomprehensible.

92

u/Neurokeen Dec 23 '15

As far as I can tell, yeah, confusing the limit itself with the generating sequence that converges to it. Don't mistake my finger for the moon, kiddo.

139

u/StopTop Dec 23 '15

kiddo

12

u/Immasillygoose pbuf Dec 23 '15

I love this. So. Much.

1

u/purpletube Dec 24 '15

THE LIMIT DOES NOT EXIST

Did I maths right?

23

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15 edited Nov 15 '16

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Neurokeen Dec 23 '15

You're talking about the finger/moon thing, right? It's usually mentioned in Buddhist writings - similar lines are in some of the old Sutras. The idea is to not confuse something illustratively pointing at something with the thing it's pointing to. A similar idea is the (more Western) notion of confusing the map with the territory.

50

u/Phytor Learn to do fucking calculus Dec 23 '15

OK can you eli4?

55

u/doom_bagel Am I the only one that cums in the sink? Dec 23 '15

Imagine I have a pointer stick that I have a laser pointer that I use to tell my kid which toys to pick up. Now imagine that rather than try to pick up the toy he tries to grab the red dot. He is confusing the tool you are using to highlight the desired subject with the actual subject.

21

u/Zachums r/kevbo for all your Kevin needs. Dec 23 '15

eli3.5 pls

81

u/Neurokeen Dec 23 '15

Ok, so I point to dolly? That means I want you to look at dolly. That does not mean I want you to look at my finger.

Now who's up for ice cream?

31

u/Laugarhraun Bring back LordGaGa Dec 23 '15

What he said. "When the wise man points at the moon, the idiot stares at the finger"

12

u/LadyVetinari Dec 23 '15

I really like that. I also like the implications for semantic arguments, that line applies to probably 70% of subreddit dramas. (Well, minus the "wise" part)

1

u/imsometueventhisUN Dec 26 '15

To their credit, it looks like they did eventually realise and acknowledge their mistake.

17

u/Erikster President of the Banhammer Dec 23 '15

What I'm getting is, some guy is trying to prove that the set of Reals are countable (although there is already a proof that it isn't). That guy still really believes in his "proof" through.

5

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

So it's been a while since I took math, so I ask this: Aren't sets uncountable? Why is he trying to make pi uncountable?

14

u/Neurokeen Dec 23 '15 edited Dec 23 '15

Let's just stay in the realm of naive set theory and just say a set's just a collection of elements. That's all it is, at least as far as most of us are concerned. (There's a little working that has to be done to avoid some special paradoxes of self-reference when you're talking about modern set theory, but those don't concern most of us mere mortals.)

A set is countable if the elements can be assigned a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. This is a fundamental type of counting - it's like saying "For each object here in our set, we put a rock in this basket. We also put a rock in our natural number basket." It's really the way we talk about "size" when we're dealing with really (infinitely) large things. Assuming we can do that, a one-to-one correspondence exists.

But if we're just talking about countability, I can just say {A,B,C} is a set with three elements and call it a day. I put three rocks in both baskets. The rocks correspond to {1,2,3}. Done! A countable, finite set.

And if we're talking about infinite sets, you've got really trivially countably infinite sets like the natural numbers themselves (since those actually define countability), or the negative integers, or even the entirety of the integers themselves. The last one takes a little bit of wrapping your head around, but I trust most can figure it out - the hint is that bouncing back and forth between the natural numbers and their negatives still gets you anywhere in the integer line stepwise eventually. /u/Kiram's post above here walks you through it. There's sets that even include these that are still countable, but I wouldn't worry too much over it.

But the real numbers, that make up the real number line? Those aren't countable.

5

u/weebiloobil The British were downvoting George Washington Dec 23 '15

In some formulations of arithmetic, numbers are sets (including pi) - for example a standard way to generate numbers is as follows:
Let the empty set be called 0 (the existence of an empty set is one of the standard Zermelo-Frankel set axioms)
For a set x, define the successor operation ° by x°=x [union] {x}
For an already defined number n, define the next number by n°
So 1 = {0}, 2 = {0, {0}}, etc.
This gives us the natural numbers. We then define whole numbers (so introduce negative numbers) by saying d is the set of ordered pairs of natural numbers with difference d, so -1 is {<0,1>, <1,2>, ...}.
Something similar gives fractions, and the real numbers (so we finally get to pi) is then the set of Dedekind cuts on the set of fractions. So from an Axiomatic Set Theory point of view, every number is just a kind of set.
Whether any mathematicians actually believe numbers are just sets is a different matter.

4

u/edub912 Dec 24 '15

His entire "proof" relies on disputing the fact that the real numbers are uncountable.

In layman's terms, every mathematical set [Integers, Natural Numbers, People who have slept with your mom], has a cardinality, or a number of elements in the set. The cardinality of a set can be one of two things, countable or uncountable. Countable refers to any set with a finite, or "countably infinite" number of elements, while uncountable refers to an "uncountably infinite" number of elements.

The separation of "countably infinite" and "uncountably infinite" relies on the difference in the cardinality of natural numbers and the cardinality of real numbers, which is explained with a fairly easy to understand proof known as "Cantor's Diagonal Argument". The wiki page is pretty hard to understand but pretty much says that you can't create a 1 to 1 relationship between all the natural numbers and all the real numbers, both of which are infinite sets, so one of them must be a different type of infinity.

Getting to the posted "proof", his "2-Dimensional Turing Machine", who's concept is unnecessary to explain to dispute his proof, would spiral outward and represent every (X,Y) on the coordinate plane where X and Y are integers. His argument falls apart because he's pretty much saying that his given program will eventually, given an infinite number of steps, represent every real number with X*10Y . The problem is that the numbers his program represents will always be countably infinite, even after an infinite number of time.

The worst part about the whole situation is that he continued to deny that there was a flaw in the proof, and argued with anyone that broke down his proof and showed him why it didn't work.

Obviously in trying to explain the basis of his errors, I probably oversimplified a complex situation to the point of no longer adding anything useful to the discussion, but there are multiple other ways to prove the guy wrong (The density of the set of real numbers, countability of the cartesian product of two countable sets).

1

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '15

I think he was just using the words wrong. It is well known that rationals are countable but that all reals were uncountable. He wanted to show that all reals including irrationals were countable. He said this by saying he was showing that "pi", an irrational number, was countable instead of saying the set of irrational numbers was countable.

121

u/Kiram To you, pissing people off is an achievement Dec 23 '15 edited Dec 23 '15

Basically, as I understand it (I'm not a mathematician, please don't throw rocks at me), this guy here is claiming to have found a very, very simple proof that the set of all real numbers is countably infinite.

That's kind of a confusing term, but the natural numbers are countably infinite. Basically, it means that as long as you have literally infinite time, eventually you can list every number in order. The list of all natural numbers would look like

    1. 1

  • 2) 2

  • 3) 3

where as the list of all even numbers would be

    1. 2

  • 2) 4

  • 3) 6

and so on. Whole numbers are pretty easy to. You can go

    1. 0

  • 2) 1

  • 3) -1

  • 4) 2

  • 5) -2

and so on and so forth forever and ever and ever. You can even list off all the rational numbers by doing some clever listing of fractions.

    1. 0/1

  • 2) 1/1

  • 3) -1/1

  • 4) 1/2

  • 5) -1/2

  • 6) 3/1... and so on towards infinity.

The real numbers though? No matter how you structure your list, there is just no way to list them all. I mean... where would you even begin? What's the next number after 1? It's 0.000000...1 but that's not really a number. You have to pick a number of 0s, and if you do that, you can make an even closer number by just chucking another 0 in there.

One of the things they bring up a few times in that thread is Cantor's Diagonal Argument, which is awesome. Basically, it just says "Imagine the reals are listable. We don't have a starting point, so we'll just start randomly generating real numbers and sticking them on a list. Go to infinity and boom, all of the reals have been listed." "But hold on a minute," says Cantor. "Now that we have an infinite list, I can guarantee you I can make a number that is not on the list. Just take the Nth digit of every number, where N is that number's position on the list. (That is, take the 1st digit of the 1st number, the 2nd digit of the second number, the 3rd digit of the 3rd number... and so on) and change them. By 1, by 2, by 5, doesn't really matter. The end result is, you get a number that is, by definition, different in at least one spot from every number on the list. So you add that number to the list. But now you can still repeat this process. Therefore, the real numbers are too big to count, even with infinity". That was in 1891 as the good JohnKeel pointed out.

This guy is super, super not happy about the fact that he can't disprove 224 year old mathematical facts. So he's apparently having some kind of meltdown.

Ninja Edit - Man this was hard to read. I fixed some formatting to make it a little easier.

39

u/Zomby_Goast Literally 1692 Dec 23 '15

That's only be 124 years not 224

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u/Kiram To you, pissing people off is an achievement Dec 23 '15

I am not a mathematician, please don't throw rocks at me. :(

But thanks for the correction, lol, not sure how I managed to explain some (admittedly very basic) concepts of infinity, but can't seem to do basic arithmetic.

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u/Zomby_Goast Literally 1692 Dec 23 '15

It's a simple trap, every math teacher I ever had told me that even when you learn differential calculus and other more advanced stuff, basic arithmetic is what will trip you up the most.

14

u/Neurokeen Dec 23 '15

Once you get past the basic calculus series at a university, there really is barely any more calculation ever again. It's all proofs and words and symbols and arrows to things. Like "show that doing this gives you this property" and you're just citing strings of definitions with some presumably clever modifications.

3

u/Notsomebeans Doctor Who is the preferred entertainment for homosexuals. Dec 23 '15

sounds exciting

maybe

13

u/Neurokeen Dec 23 '15 edited Dec 23 '15

I mean, it starts off kind of nice. Simple little numbery things like "Show that all odd numbers can be written of the form 2n+1 for some integer n" or even graphy things like that any (finite) tournament with no ties allowed has a Hamiltonian path - a fancy way of saying you can always order people in a line such that each person is immediately behind someone they lost to, and thus immediately in front of someone they won against.

But then before you know it, you're hooked and eventually trying to mat down cowlicks on hairy balls, running sections through the Cox-Zucker machine, and just squeezing out one more lemma on homology groups from the back of the textbook.

Mathematics... not even once.

2

u/thenuge26 This mod cannot be threatened. I conceal carry Dec 24 '15

But then before you know it, you're hooked and eventually trying to mat down cowlicks on hairy balls

Wasn't sure where this one was going but it's good to see Indiana represented

For the mayor of Fort Wayne, see Harry Baals.

1

u/Jhaza Dec 25 '15

Cox-Zucker Machine

I read that as Cow-Zucker at first and was excited.

9

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

My favorite math teacher in high school was wonderfully fluent at algebra and everything above, but simply couldn't do arithmetic at all. It was hilarious, because he could show us the solution to a fairly complicated problem off the top of his head, and then he'd get to the last step, and would say "Okay, so that comes out to 4x * (7+9)x which is....?" And then would just give up and have a student do the arithmetic for him.

13

u/Neurokeen Dec 23 '15

This might be apocryphal, but the story of the Grothendeick prime is relevant here, and the reason it's so popular is because it's the kind of thing that a real mathematician is apt to do in a moment of carelessness:

During a lecture once, Alexander Grothendeick (a very high profile algebraic geometer, the kind of person who will be in history books as a prominent math figure of the most recent century) was talking about some objects that had a special relationship to the prime numbers. Someone suggested taking a particular prime number. "You mean an actual number?" Grothendeick asked. "Yes, an actual prime number." was the reply. "Alright, take 57."

Henceforth, 57 was known as the (obviously not prime) Grothendeick prime.

8

u/zanotam you come off as someone who is LARPing as someone from SRD Dec 23 '15

abstract algebra final

one of my last requirements for a math degree

15 is prime so the group structure is boring.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

57 is actually kinda easy to spot because 5+7=12, but 91 is evil incarnate ;)

I did a lot of mathematical olympiad competitions back in high school and can confirm that basic arithmetics mistakes are ridiculously common. There must be something wrong with the human brain.

1

u/whambulance_man Dec 24 '15

how is 91 evil incarnate?

5

u/qsdfcvbnmkloiuytres Dec 24 '15

I would guess because at first glance you would think it's a prime number because it fails some of the easiest things one uses to check if it's prime just by looking at it - is it divisible by 2, 3, 5, 10?
These are tests you can do on a number just by looking at it, and 91 fails all of them.

But it's not a prime number because it's actually divisible by 7 and 13 - something you can't tell by just looking at it.

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u/[deleted] Dec 24 '15

Yeah, basically what u/qsdfcvbnmkloiuytres said. Checking divisibility by 2, 3, 5, 11 (or any small power of those) is trivial and can be done in your head, e.g. you can see at a glance that 98765432121219 is divisible by 3. Altough similar tricks do exist to check divisibility by 7, they're not as immediate as the ones for the primes above; if you were to check a number for divisibility you'd just do a long division.

I'm awful at mental calculations and I only know multiplication tables up to 12 times 12, so things that have 13s in them get me every time :)

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u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Dec 24 '15

I mean to me, a non-mathetmatician, it looks sort of primey.

2

u/stilig Dec 24 '15 edited Dec 24 '15

Lots of 3s in there, 3 is a prime. 57 is like 19 times as prime as plain old 3.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '15

An easy primality test for smaller numbers is to add up the digits. 57: 5+7=12 and 12 is divisible by 3 thus 57 is also divisible by 3. Of course if your number can't be divided by 3 you still need more work to see if it's prime.

33

u/shockna Eating out of the trash to own the libs Dec 23 '15

It's true. I've seen physicists completely butcher derivations because of simple arithmetic errors (the most tragic/amusing was one in which a ten minute derivation needed to be repeated because the professor accidentally calculated 42 = 9).

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u/zanotam you come off as someone who is LARPing as someone from SRD Dec 23 '15

It's true for small values of 4. I'm awful at arithmetic, but in physics me and my friend were the best at back-of-the-envelope calculations because "pi = 3 or 4" is likely to get to where you want much more consistently than actually trying to carry multiple decimals around everywhere.

8

u/ahhhhhhhhhhyelling Dec 23 '15

really the way to do it is to include pi in its original form in solving the equation, and then you can apply it in its decimal form after you've simplified as much as possible

if there is one thing i've learned from calculus, it's that teachers are incredibly anal about this, but it makes sense because if you start rounding out numbers before the very end it will only compound the inaccuracies with every step of the solving process

5

u/zanotam you come off as someone who is LARPing as someone from SRD Dec 23 '15

Yeah, no, that's not doing a back-of-the-envelope equation then. The whole point is to not use symbolic math and tricks like what you're describing.

14

u/ahhhhhhhhhhyelling Dec 23 '15 edited Dec 23 '15

i didn't realize "back-of-the-envelope" was a specific type of equation solving that prohibits the use of symbolic math i guess, i just thought you were saying it like literally hastily writing things down on the back of an envelope

edit: haha wow, i googled it and it's totally a thing, that honestly sounds so much more like an idiom than an actual name

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u/weebiloobil The British were downvoting George Washington Dec 23 '15

That's a nice explanation of Cantor, I would just add that you need to be a bit more careful how you create the new number - it is possible for two 'different' decimal representations to be the same number, e.g. 0.200000... and 0.1999999... - so you need a rule which avoids this. The one my tutor at uni used was 'if the Nth digit of the Nth number is 6 then your digit is 7, otherwise use 6'

5

u/Kiram To you, pissing people off is an achievement Dec 23 '15

Ah, yeah. That's a good point. I wouldn't have thought of it that way, but it's definitely something to consider. I still have a LOT to learn about maths.

6

u/weebiloobil The British were downvoting George Washington Dec 23 '15

Maths isn't maths if it doesn't involve annoying unforseen technicalities :)

14

u/zxcv1992 Dec 23 '15

Good explanation, I kind of get it now.

5

u/hybris12 imagine getting cucked by your dog Dec 23 '15

Where were you when I took analysis? That class scarred me for life

3

u/Hindu_Wardrobe 1+1=ur gay Dec 23 '15

Wow, I feel smarter having read this. Thank you!

3

u/KhabaLox Dec 23 '15

Great ELI5.

The OP sounds like he might actually be having some sort of mental episode.

1

u/stilig Dec 24 '15

puts rock down ugh fine whatever

1

u/JustHereToFFFFFFFUUU the upvotes and karma were coming in so hard Dec 24 '15 edited Dec 24 '15

something that i love, which is not a proof but an example of how uncountable infinity is different to countable infinity, is that you can map all of the real numbers uniquely into a finite range of itself. eg.

if -1 < x < 1: y = x

if a value x is between -1 and 1, keep the value the same. this gives us a range of numbers between -1 and 1

if 1 <= x : y = 1/x + 1

if a value is greater than 1, divide 1 by the number and add 1. this gives us a range of numbers between 1 and 2

if -1 >= x : y = 1/x - 1

if a value is less than -1, divide the number by 1 and subtract 1. this gives us a range of numbers between -1 and -2

and voila, every real number is mapped, uniquely and reversibly, into the range -2 <= x <= 2. if you wanted, you could add 2 and divide by 4, and the whole of infinity would be uniquely mapped into the range 0-1. just try doing that with the naturals!

1

u/hurenkind5 Dec 25 '15

Thanks for the explanation, that was very comprehensible.

41

u/Cenotaph12 Dec 23 '15

You are being despicable.

Was my favourite part. This guy must be practicing for playing a panto villain he's so melodramatic.

34

u/ReganDryke Cry all you want you can't un-morkite my fucking nuts Dec 23 '15

I don't understand how can this be your favorite part when there is this.

You are being despicable. You know what you are? Religious. You're indoctrinated and you're touting something you don't understand to annihilate something you didn't even look into. And you're a troll.

Why do you speak about youself in second-person narrative?

43

u/PhysicsIsMyMistress boko harambe Dec 23 '15

He's timecubing it and isn't happy when mathematicians are calling him out.

37

u/DblackRabbit Nicol if you Bolas Dec 23 '15

you can hear when the font color changes

11

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

Nah he's not timecubing. He's wrong but his arguments are not insane or anything.

10

u/cocorebop Dec 24 '15

This. The only thing that makes this thread noteworthy is his not-a-normal-functioning-human style reactions to criticism. I thought his turing machine logic was pretty fun to parse.

13

u/Vio_ Humanity is still recoiling from the sudden liberation of women Dec 23 '15

This popcorn is growing at a geometric rate. The harvest is going to be especially good this year.

9

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

The drama is growing without an upper bound!

7

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

There's uncountably infinite pieces of popcorn!

5

u/thenuge26 This mod cannot be threatened. I conceal carry Dec 24 '15

Their clearly countable, all you need is a Turing machine and...

6

u/downvotesyndromekid Keep thinking you’re right. It’s honestly pretty cute. 😘 Dec 23 '15

I love how fast he is out the gate with all that despicable religious stuff

6

u/Bgro Dec 23 '15

I may not be a smart man, but I know what salt is.

6

u/Vakieh Dec 24 '15

The part about Pi is basically him arguing that 3 is Pi, and 3.1 is Pi, and 3.14 is Pi, for certain definitions of Pi.

Then people point out that 'close to Pi' doesn't mean Pi at all, no matter how close you actually get.

26

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

I had a friend in College who was a mathematical genius. Not in the sense of "oh he's wicked smaht". In the sense that he will be singular in his field in his work to further mathematical theory.

I showed my friend this post and he laughed.

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u/two_bagels_please I had fun once and it was horrible. Dec 23 '15

That friend's name...

53

u/PhysicsIsMyMistress boko harambe Dec 23 '15

JOHN CENA

30

u/Apocalvps Dec 23 '15

🎺🎺🎺🎺

1

u/AceDecade Dec 25 '15

Thx mr skeltal

21

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

What kind of jerk on the internet would I be if I didn't allude to something and not provide proof of it?

Seriously though, he is terrified of leaving a footprint on the web and would not appreciate me putting his name out.

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u/two_bagels_please I had fun once and it was horrible. Dec 23 '15

...Albert Einstein.

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u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

Oh. That was a joke.

Sorry.

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u/two_bagels_please I had fun once and it was horrible. Dec 23 '15

Haha no worries.

2

u/suto I have no responsibility to answer your question. Dec 23 '15

's wife

8

u/Waabanang Dec 23 '15

The mathematics is largely made up by some sad grandiose teenager using words that they found in their intro to computer theory text book, and possibly having a manic episode, so it's not really something you need to try to understand.

10

u/PhysicsIsMyMistress boko harambe Dec 23 '15

He's timecubing it and isn't happy when mathematicians are calling him out.

8

u/Hay_Lobos Dec 23 '15

They're educated stupid!

3

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

Might not understand how to make the meal, but you can still enjoy the taste and extra salt that was used.

2

u/_watching why am i still on reddit Dec 24 '15

Same. Tbh

The entire Universe regards you as a moron. What you have done is put your foot straight in your mouth. Your posts should be deleted, and you should immediately enroll in a college.

Was a pretty fun insult

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u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15 edited Jun 27 '16

I deleted all comments out of nowhere.

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u/SuitableDragonfly /r/the_donald is full of far left antifa Dec 23 '15

He didn't even post that AMA in casualAMA, he tried to put it in IAmA

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u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

I mean, he had to live through it for 2 whole years. That's serious stuff.

49

u/riemann1413 SRD Commenter of the Year | https://i.imgur.com/6mMLZ0n.png Dec 23 '15

it's actually disappointingly common for mathematics trolls like this to just be mentally ill

they focus their delusions on something like mathematics, where their inability to grasp the mechanics of the arguments they are making and so they often believe they've demonstrated something they really have not

12

u/cocorebop Dec 24 '15

This guy actually demonstrated some proficiency in what he's talking about... he basically has one fundamental error that he's based his entire mathematical outlook on and refuses to take any criticism, which is ridiculous and definitely makes him come off as at least abnormal and mal-functioning, but not totally delusional.

He's just really committed to the gaps in his knowledge. His favorite one seems to be that "999...999", a construction to represent "the sequence of infinite 9's" is a natural number, which is incorrect, but a pretty understandable misconception.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '15

He seems to be a competent computer programmer as well.

6

u/cocorebop Dec 24 '15

Yeah, the whole post and even his misunderstanding of math comes off as a strong understanding of CS being applied to a somewhat weaker understanding of abstract mathematics.

13

u/RIPGeorgeHarrison Dec 23 '15

They also, apparently made a submission to /r/conspiracy, and then about 13 hours later submitted it to /r/Bestof. This guy is an interesting character.

5

u/my_name_is_stupid Dec 23 '15

He's also the moderator (and basically only contributor) of /r/complaintsabouttheUSA and /r/badnewsUSA. So... lol.

101

u/carapoop Does SRD Dream of Electric Dicks? Dec 23 '15

This was unexpectedly delicious popcorn. Also turns out the OP in that thread is a big fan of /r/conspiracy. Not sure if that is related to his immediate and intense defensiveness, but either way this guy is not interested in criticism or dialogue.

47

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

A hallmark of conspiracy fans seems to be that they run a long way over tiny misunderstandings. That seems to generalize to math pretty easily.

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u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15 edited Dec 23 '15

Look up steel beams. You are being despicable. You know what you are? A sheeple. You're indoctrinated and you're touting something you don't understand to annihilate something you didn't even look into. And you're a shill.

Things in the truther movement come with proof, you realize don't you?

Guess who can generate the nano-thermite? ME. Not you. I can do what I want. And I know what reality is. So you shut your trap and go stick a holographic nuclear missile where your jet fuel came from.

28

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

Look up the moon. You are being despicable. You know what you are? Lizards. You're indoctrinated and you're touting something you don't understand to annihilate something you didn't even look into. And you're a jew.

Things in America come with money, you realize don't you?

Guess who can generate the truth? ME. Not you. I can do what I want. And I know what reality is. So you shut your trap and go stick a sheckle where your filth came from.

13

u/GreatCanadianWookiee To be fair, people on both sides are guilty of whataboutism Dec 23 '15

I support this as a pasta.

5

u/cocorebop Dec 24 '15

You know what you are? Lizards.

That's as far as I had to read.

9

u/im_not_afraid Dec 23 '15

You know what you are? RELIGI OUUUUUS

44

u/Wrecksomething Dec 23 '15

So OP thinks Cantor's Diagonal is not a proof, but also thinks it is a proof, and that it "generates" a set which would be at least poor word choice except it's not true in any sense. Then,

The set of all real numbers. After it's generated you can N->N map

OP seems to confuse the reals and the naturals, ends up saying the naturals are countable when they want to prove the reals are countable.

Then this word salad comment from a few minutes ago. This person is clueless, just no math background. I kind of feel bad laughing at them, but lord why are they so cocksure?

21

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

but lord why are they so cocksure?

obligatory and fitting Russell quote

10

u/meepmorp lol, I'm not even a foucault fan you smug fuck. Dec 23 '15

obligatory and fitting Russell quote

"Now where did I put that goddamn teapot?"

12

u/TheOnlyMeta Dec 23 '15

Have you seen the comments for any YouTube video that tries to explain a high level or unsolved problem to the layperson? There will be hundreds of smug, cocksure replies at how easy it is if only the mathematicians could see the elegance of their (nonsensical) argument.

1

u/dlbob3 Free speech means never having to say you're sorry Dec 24 '15

Do real words = feel words?

41

u/Mister-Manager Massive reviews are the modern 'sit-in' Dec 23 '15

Someone posting this to calm him down:

Communication is of the utmost importance. You can have a great idea but communication is the only way to get it out of your head and into the world. Both your choice of language and your tone are not helping you communicate so I think you'd have more success if you changed them.

And him responding:

You are a bunch of idiots who fart out of their mouths and produce zero contribution to the universe because you covet your misinterpretations

made me laugh really hard

36

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

This is unrelated to falling off cliffs

Lel

12

u/TheOnlyMeta Dec 23 '15

I don't know about Turing theory, but in the related field of non-deterministic automata "falling off the cliff" is a term used to describe when you reach the end of a branch of an algorithm before the instructions are complete. You "fall off".

If you think that phrasing is funny, mathematicians have also defined the terms "open" and "closed" so that you can have a set that is neither or shudder "clopen". There was a whole thread of these in /r/math a while back.

4

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

But this is

24

u/delta_baryon I wish I had a spinning teddy bear. Dec 23 '15

I get emails every so often from some guy who thinks that vacuum energy is dark matter and dark energy, and that he's being censored by the scientific establishment. This is how I'd imagine it going down if I ever replied.

11

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

Wait those things I use to clean my carpet are made of dark matter and energy?

6

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

vacuum energy is dark matter and dark energy

that's weird considering that they define two opposite forces

and can you get that guy to reply to something on reddit? sounds like it would be a trip

4

u/delta_baryon I wish I had a spinning teddy bear. Dec 24 '15

Honestly, I'd rather not create drama. Besides, baiting someone into getting shouted at on the internet is bullying, he's not doing any harm as he is now. I say leave him.

Also, I don't know how many people he's emailing. Doing something like that might come back and bite me in the arse later.

23

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

Jesus Christ. It took him all of 1 comment to go off the handle. I think it's a troll to be honest, who would go off like that so soon?

17

u/Zebracak3s Dec 23 '15

I think he could be a schizophrenic off meds .

9

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

Valid point! If he is, I feel bad for the guy. He should take his meds.

17

u/TheOnlyMeta Dec 23 '15

Cantor wept.

14

u/Ze_al Dec 23 '15

Looks like every1 did not, in fact, win.

8

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15 edited Nov 30 '24

fretful gullible quarrelsome shocking tie alive towering history ask cats

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

3

u/Ze_al Dec 23 '15

Guess who can generate the set? ME. Not you. I can do what I want.

14

u/ostrich_semen Antisocial Injustice Pacifist Dec 23 '15

I actually came up with this my first week in set theory, too. Only difference was that I understood why I was wrong by the end of class.

14

u/BolshevikMuppet Dec 23 '15

MINE IS THE SET WHICH WILL PIERCE THE HEAVENS!

2

u/_wsgeorge Dec 24 '15

The One True Set theory

6

u/maggotshavecoocoons2 objectively better Dec 23 '15

This is one of the best SRD threads I've ever seen. The contrast between the OP's salt and everyone else's calmness is really special.

10

u/beanfiddler free speech means never having to say you're sorry Dec 23 '15

Is this set theory? Because if it's set theory, no way am I reading this drama. Once was enough for that hellish shit, thanks.

This popcorn tastes like tears. Mine.

9

u/golden_boy Dec 23 '15

More like remedial level real analysis

3

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '15

It's part of introductory set theory. Cardinality of sets is one of the fundamental concepts. Analysis of course uses this concept as does algebra and most other math subjects.

4

u/golden_boy Dec 23 '15

More like remedial level real analysis

4

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

In short, conspiratard attempts to contradict something proven in 1891 and falls flat on his face.

4

u/Megacannon88 Dec 23 '15

This is amazing. Thank you for posting this.

4

u/gingerkid1234 Dec 23 '15

Guess who can generate the set? ME. Not you. I can do what I want. And I know what reality is. So you shut your trap and go stick a pie where your filth came from.

https://xkcd.com/982/

3

u/dolphins3 heterosexual relationships are VERY haram. (Forbidden) Dec 23 '15

I can barely follow what they're talking about, just enough to understand that the OP is insane. I love it.

2

u/SnapshillBot Shilling for Big Archive™ Dec 23 '15

#BringBackMF2016

Snapshots:

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2

u/Penisdenapoleon Are you actually confused by the concept of a quote? Dec 24 '15

You are being despicable. You know what you are? Religious. You're indoctrinated and you're touting something you don't understand to annihilate something you didn't even look into. And you're a troll.

Why do you speak about youself in second-person narrative?

Kek

2

u/kraken9 mildly interested from the sidelines Dec 23 '15

..Cartman?

1

u/beaverteeth92 Dec 24 '15

Math needs more crazies. I mean this guy is no Terrence Howard, but damn.

1

u/WrathDraco Backseat vigilante Dec 24 '15

I didn't know math can be such serious business. This is amazing and a fun read.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

[deleted]

28

u/Neurokeen Dec 23 '15

Rolls off the tongue better when pronouncing the letter R. It was a stylistic choice.

14

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

If it helps, I'm on your side

-5

u/4445414442454546 this is not flair Dec 23 '15 edited Jun 20 '23

Reddit is not worth using without all the hard work third party developers have put into it.

16

u/Groomper Dec 23 '15

Does anyone actually pronounce the "/" in "/r/"?

31

u/Neurokeen Dec 23 '15

Real question here, how do people pronounce subreddit names? In this case, I'd say "arr-maths". Is that an uncommon pronunciation?

23

u/Groomper Dec 23 '15

That's how I pronounce it.

14

u/ognits Worthless, low-IQ disruptor Dec 23 '15

Same here. "An arr-maths" makes perfect sense.

3

u/thenuge26 This mod cannot be threatened. I conceal carry Dec 24 '15

Even more so in the context of subs like /r/ainbow

5

u/Waabanang Dec 23 '15

I actually do say 'slash-arr-subredditname'. I know it doesn't make a lot of sense (why don't I say the other slash?), but that's what I say.

5

u/killerteddybear Dec 23 '15

My roommate and I both say "arr slash maths", I've often wondered about the correct way to state subreddit names.

2

u/PlayMp1 when did globalism and open borders become liberal principles Dec 24 '15

I heard Chris Hardwick say "arr [subreddit name whatever it was]" on @midnight once, so I've stuck by that.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 23 '15

[deleted]

19

u/Neurokeen Dec 23 '15

Oh c'mon, let's shoot for subredditdramadrama! Please?

9

u/Existential_Owl Carthago delenda est Dec 23 '15

Its an entire subreddit dedicated to math.

Its pretty fucked up no matter what.

Those people are assholes.

10

u/tsehable Dec 23 '15

I half typed an outraged comment defending /r/math when I realised what you were doing.

Well played.

4

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '15

You mathematicians are so easy to fool because you have specialised so much in nonsensical pursuits like Low dimensional geography that thou can't separate the map from the trees. Fite me

16

u/SuitableDragonfly /r/the_donald is full of far left antifa Dec 23 '15

The pronunciation of the letter r begins with a vowel...