scapp (u/scapp) - Readit News

scapp commented on “A Course of Pure Mathematics” – G. H. Hardy (1921) [pdf] gutenberg.org/files/38769... · Posted by u/bikenaga

OldGuyInTheClub · 8 months ago

From the title page. No Ph.D. necessary to be a legend in them days. ;-)

  G. H. HARDY, M.A., F.R.S.
  FELLOW OF NEW COLLEGE
  SAVILIAN PROFESSOR OF GEOMETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
  LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

scapp · 8 months ago

M.A. was the highest degree available in the UK at the time [1]. The closest equivalent to a PhD program might be the Prize Fellowship that Hardy had from 1900 to 1906, though it's certainly not one to one. Don't get the impression that Hardy was done with his education when he got his masters degree.

[1] https://www.economics.soton.ac.uk/staff/aldrich/Doc1.htm

[2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.1949.000...

scapp commented on How the human brain contends with the strangeness of zero quantamagazine.org/how-th... · Posted by u/apollinaire

4ad · 10 months ago

The definition of natural numbers used in any sort of formalized mathematics includes zero. Without zero, you don't have induction (and ℕ wouldn't form a monoid).

scapp · 10 months ago

Nothing wrong with starting at 1 for induction, but yes, having an additive monoid is nice (still get a multiplicative monoid with N*)

scapp commented on The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023) beautifulpublicdata.com/t... · Posted by u/not_a_boat

willis936 · a year ago

Not to be confused with the Futurama episode named after this theory, written by Bob Odenkirk, and that definitely lives rent free in my mind.

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

scapp · a year ago

*Bill Odenkirk. Bob is his brother

scapp commented on Nintendo's online servers for Wii U and 3DS shut down today en-americas-support.ninte... · Posted by u/candiodari

scosman · a year ago

Related fun story: there was a group trying to beat every Super Mario maker level. After years of effort, they had 1 level left. They were down to the wire to get it done before the services shutdown. They got it done 3 days ago.

https://twitter.com/Team0Percent

https://www.issmmbeatenyet.com

scapp · a year ago

Nice! I wondered if someone would beat that TAS level anyway.

scapp commented on Minecraft exploit is allowing attackers to get any Xbox/MS account banned windowscentral.com/softwa... · Posted by u/josephcsible

accrual · a year ago

Yeah, it seems like it relies on some external tool to make it appear like the language came from another gamer tag. That seems like the root cause to me - how is it possible to emit messages under an account you're not logged into?

In Minecraft Java everything is tied to a UUID that's unique to each account, so it shouldn't be possible to do a simple spoof of a nickname.

scapp · a year ago

It's easy to find the UUID associated to a nickname. For example, here's [0] the one for `accrual`

[0] https://namemc.com/profile/Accrual.1

scapp commented on Georg Cantor and His Heritage arxiv.org/abs/math/020924... · Posted by u/hackandthink

jabowery · a year ago

Interval Arguments: Two Refutations of Cantor’s 1874 and 1878 Arguments:

https://www.academia.edu/93528167/Interval_Arguments_Two_Ref...

scapp · a year ago

It's always fun to make fun of cranks. Thanks for linking that. The author really needs to find the right statement of what they call the Nested Interval Theorem. I cracked up at the complete misuse of it in the "Interval Argument for the Rationals" section

scapp commented on Block Dude (Ti-83) in the Browser azich.org/blockdude/... · Posted by u/throwup238

scapp · 2 years ago

Kind of disappointing that it doesn't have the victory screen. But man, my fingers still remember that combo you have to do for those 4 wide areas.

scapp commented on Ternary circuits: R=3 is not the Optimal Radix for Computation (2019) arxiv.org/abs/1908.06841... · Posted by u/danny00

FartyMcFarter · 2 years ago

> A demonstration that e=2.718 rounded to 3 is the best radix for computation is disproved.

Is this some weird attempt at humour, or meant as a serious statement? I mean the mention of e of course.

scapp · 2 years ago

2 line explanation of where e comes from here: to represent a number x in base b, you need roughly log_b(x) digits. If you weight that by the number of different digits in base b, you get b * log_b(x) = b * log(x)/log(b) = b/log(b) * log(x) (where now the log is any base you care to choose).

So assuming x > 1, this is minimized precisely when b/log(b) is minimized. The derivative of b/log(b) is (log(b) - log(e))/log(b)^2, so this is zero when b = e. (The second derivative is 1/(e log(e)) > 0, so this is a minimum).

scapp commented on Basics of Proofs (2017) [pdf] theory.stanford.edu/~jvon... · Posted by u/waldarbeiter

cubefox · 2 years ago

"Everything was proven" ... everything to satisfy a mathematician, not a logician. Formal proofs are generally very unwieldy, because informal proofs treat all the most obvious parts as obvious. In some cases these parts are not even trivial to prove formally. Last time I checked there was still no formal version of Cantor's diagonalization argument.

scapp · 2 years ago

> Last time I checked there was still no formal version of Cantor's diagonalization argument.

Formalization? Like a computer checked proof?

Lean: https://leanprover-community.github.io/mathlib_docs/logic/fu...

Coq: https://github.com/bmsherman/finite/blob/63706fa4898aa05296c...

Isabelle: https://isabelle.in.tum.de/website-Isabelle2009-2/dist/libra...

scapp commented on Google researcher, long out of math, cracks devilish problem about sets quantamagazine.org/long-o... · Posted by u/kentricon

notgettingit · 3 years ago

Set family {{1,2,3,4}, {1}, {2}, {3}, {4}} has all 4 elements appearing in exactly 2 sets out of the 5, that is 40%. What am I missing?

scapp · 3 years ago

Check out the replies to this comment [1] with the same attempted counterexample. Your set isn't union closed because {1}U{2} = {1, 2} isn't in it (same for {1}U{3} etc.).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34236889#34240381

u/scapp

KarmaCake day82April 1, 2021View Original