Do you go on message boards and spam 42-page threads insisting that every mathematician in the world is wrong and you’re correct? Are you unable to change your mind when presented with proofs and evidence? Are you completely unaware that there are some things you don’t know? No? Then you’re fine.
Back when I was in the last year of my math PhD, I was looking into finance companies in case the academic plot didn’t work out. One of the interviews involved estimating some thing for some reason I don’t remember:
Me: So the total is 8 for this category, 3 for this other category, and 1 for the last category, making a total of 14.
Interviewer: You added 8, 3, and 1, and got 14?
Me: (beat) Yes.
Don’t feel bad. When I took Geometry we had a substitute teacher who couldn’t make heads or tails of the textbook. Except he was the department head and had WRITTEN the damn book! Too much Calculus for his own good.
His daughter was FINE, but was a couple years older and ignored me. This is not to say that those facts are tied together, since plenty of girls my own age ignored me. She became my dentist’s hygienist and I almost asked her out, except she was engaged. ETA: Come to think of it, I might’ve been, too. (singing) A pretty girl is like a conspiracy theory! Nope, doesn’t scan.
There is probably a psychological condition describing someone who constantly shifts topics, but I don’t think I want to know. Instead, I will talk about my eighth-grade Math teacher…
I think he just asserted that because the terms of a series go to 0 then so does its sum. Didn’t he just “prove” that 0.999… = 0 ? (but more importantly why doesn’t he see this consequence himself?)
OK, I will. That thread is a porch light attracting trolls, crackpots, mystics, conspiracy theorists, and all-purpose nincompoops. Every day that it remains open represents a net loss to civilization. Every time it expands to another page, a devil gets his horns.
For the love of all that is holy, stop posting in that thread!
It looks like schooner26 may have finally gone away. Granted, it’s from someone else saying exactly what I said a half-dozen times before, and the only response I got was the usual dismissive, ‘Oh, you don’t understand my post,’ without any further explanation; but it’s better than nothing.
Frankly, I don’t know if schooner’s conversion is genuine or if they’ve just given up (be it trolling or clinging tenaciously to whatever fucked-up beliefs he had). Not knocking Topologist but I didn’t see their post containing anything new, not in content nor in presentation.
At the moment, schooner26 is wanking about “real world applications of infinity” in plane geometry. (I don’t understand why non-mathematicians fetishize infinity like that, but whatever.) Topologist responded to it, which made me want to warn him (professional courtesy), but it’s probably better that I take the opportunity to wash my hands of the thread.
I think 777777777777777777777’s out of it too. His only posts are in that single thread, and I suspect the moderators have little patience left for him.
Oh, I know what I’m risking getting myself into, but I rarely have time to post (see my post count), so it’s a low risk. It’s just that it was a particularly slow Friday afternoon in the summer.
And no, I didn’t think I was posting anything new or remarkable in the earlier post and really didn’t expect the reaction from schooner26 that it got. But, damn it, someone was (inching toward being) wrong on the internet, and it was one of the good guys! (The issue of characterizing vs defining the reals.)
Some strange time-warp caused me to recommend that he do that before he did it. Either that or I wasn’t actually reading what he posted. Surely the former is more likely.
ETA: Just read the post to 7s, and now I’m even more convinced that 1 + 1 + 1 = 1
There was a discussion of other models for R and the Loewenheim-Skolem theorem, but it was lost in the noise. I’m also surprised that schooner26 acquiesced so quickly. Maybe he wanted to give up but was trying to save face by finding besides the usual suspects in the thread to surrender to?
I know! Infinity is a cool concept if you’re eight or ten, but after you find there’s not much you can do with it the charm vanishes and it becomes just another stupid number.
She became my dentist’s hygienist and I almost asked her out, except she was engaged. ETA: Come to think of it, I might’ve been, too. (singing) A pretty girl is like a conspiracy theory! Nope, doesn’t scan.