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Pranks - April 26, 2010Rating: 3/5 (12 votes cast)
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I think one of the worst pranks from mathematicians is their sly placement of the four colors problem, in layman's terms, in puzzle books and websites, presenting it as a solvable problem. Needless to say, thousands of drawings later, I declared it impossible (proof by exhaustion).
But it is solvable. And maybe someone will look at it just the right way and come up with an elemental proof...
That's the best thing about Math, don't you know. In other fields, like physics, once something is solved (for example, simple mechanics like on a billiards table), it's solved, and time to move on.
In math, nothing is ever that far from new discoveries and new insights, when someone looks at an old, simple thing with new eyes. or, as the Ross Mathematics Program taught us, "Think deeply of simple things." (http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/ross/studentinfo.html)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq
Ah, proof by 'fuck this shit!'. After all methods fail, i come crawling back to you.
What do you mean?
i think he means its his last resort...but i dont get why he crawls 'back'..that implies its if not the starting point of his methods then at least an intermediate one..giving up b4 having given up..thts like finding infinity on the way to infinity..
i think he means that his conclusion to previous quandaries is proof by fuck this shit
I see you know MIT engineers.
For some reason, every school I have attended... the engineers always managed to cause trouble. But I must admit, they sure did throw great parties ^_^
Or Stanford engineers also...
what about the notation of trigmetric functions? think about it how come cos^2(n)=(cos(n))^2
and cos^-1(n)doesnt= cos^(0-1)(n)
it makes no sense, am i right?
I use neither of those notations, I always write (cos(n))² and arccos(n), respectively.
the engineers at my uni tried to steal our massive pink neck tie...
Wait. UW?