146
How To Make A Mathematician Angry - January 16, 2010Rating: 4.9/5 (16 votes cast)
Facebook Page // Twitter Page
13 Comments
Leave a comment
Profile pictures are tied to your email address and can
be set up at Gravatar.
Click here for recent comments.
(Note: You must have javascript enabled to leave comments, otherwise you will get a comment submission error.)
(Note: You must have javascript enabled to leave comments, otherwise you will get a comment submission error.)
I don’t get it. :( The 4/9N-2/3 looks very arbitrary but I don’t see a reason for a mathematician to cringe because of it. Please explain.
It makes a mathematician cringe because it switches the standard use of epsilons and Ns. Usually, to prove convergence of stuff(n) to L as n approaches infinity , you must prove that for every e>0, there exists N such that for every n>N, |stuff - L|<e. (e is epsilon here)
If you switch the roles of epsilon and N in the proof, it will take ages to understand you.
Correction to previous post: You must prove that |stuff(n) - L| < e.
Wait, what the hell, it doesn't display the "less than" sign, and deleted the "e" to its right. That's weird.
It wrote |stuff(n) - L| less than e.
Ya, that's annoying haha. I changed it to use the html code for < so it shows up in your entry now.
ODDin: someone probably figured removing everything that might remotely look like dangerous HTML tags is safer than escaping it :)
I'm a mathematician and it doesn't make me cringe. It makes me burn with curiosity for Spiked Math's next line of the argument...
I don't know--I didn't like Calculus proofs that much anyway...Number Theory was much more fun.
Cringe.
Does it really mathematician cringe? Maybe if you call calculus mathematics.. :))
Well, a further problem is that we get negative epsilon0 for natural N. This is really disgusting!
By the way, you can show it trivially with l'Hôpital, since both, d(2n)/dn = 2 and d(3n+2)/dn = 3 exist. The fraction of these is 2/3, as claimed.
l'hopital is overkill... just multiply both sides by 1/n and use that 1/n -> 0 as n->oo. i think this one is kind of lame, unless there's some great punchline that i'm missing
Well, if you want a formal prove you have to show that each of the limes exist, which is more work to write down, I think. Either way, the problem is trivial; The joke is the unconventional (=bad) use of epsilon and N and the fact, that epsilon is not necessarily positive.