What are /r/badmathematics' favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

> (So quantum mechanics and action at a distance is intuitive but relativity postulates are not.)

A lot of religious people love the notion of quantum mechanics because it requires 'observation' to make things happen. (That's not remotely right but that's where they are starting at.) Therefore, God is an 'ultimate observer' that sets the universe going with His divine ability to ignore Heisenberg's uncertainly principle.

> Again, I'm fairly uneducated so I'm not sure how novel his claims are, but so far they mostly seem good. Granted, I'm only 30 pages in; his attitude makes it hard to take him seriously.

I'm surprised that you've taken a serious crack at the book, but from reading the amazon page seeing claims like,

> a multitude of bizarre new operations made possible by unified logic, such as division by zero for example, and that's not even the weirdest example, not even close

just make me wanna cry >:(, first off in any new idea or theory the axioms have to be consistent for something to be considered. Like I swear if we run this against the crackpot index I bet /r/badmathematics will not find the upper bound of what's wrong with this text.

For what it's worth, there's a quite hefty preview on the book's amazon page. The portions I've glanced over so far seem borderline bad philosophy/bad mathematics, but from the table of contents I'm sure it gets into more mathematical territory.

Pretty sure they're a troll. There's another paper from the same author which cites a book on tennis, and a paper from an aquatic conservation magazine. They have one other paper which is just a sequence of photos of notebooks, plus one photo of pool balls.

The comments!

The first comment is...

> “calculus states that .999… can written as \sum_{i=1}^\infty 9*.1^i”. Okay, it is completely irrelevant, where you state it… it’s merely a definition. the one which says that .999…=9/9=1, shows just that it’s the same thing…. the way you define it, is naturally not the same thing, then how it is defined… it is defined either as 9/9=1, or as a series… both will give us the same result… defining it another way you can get that .999 is not equal to 1. This is definitely not high calculus… this is merely first semester…

To which the author replies:

> Please don’t be personally abusive by suggesting things like “this is merely first semester [calculus]”.

"Paper thin" is not exressive enough to describe this guy's skin. It's more like "Tattered one-ply".

He also goes on to say:

> Instead of arguing this myself, I’ll just refer you to a mathematician who has put it in more detailed (and more “mathematical”) terms and language than I have. https://www.filesanywhere.com/fs/v.aspx?v=8b6966895b6673aa6b6c

That link is now broken, but it appears that once upon a time, it linked to john gabriel.

This is just glorious.

I think this is the sim you're referring to. I had it in my history.

"Regex"es aren't. They have backreferences, which I think require PDAs if we're sticking with the standard types of automatons.

The following looks relevant: "Extending finite automata to efficiently match Perl-compatible regular expressions" (PDF here)

I guess crank runs in the family

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3277467_The_radiation_continuum_model_of_light_and_the_Galilean_invariance_of_Maxwell's_equations

"The book develops fully, from first principles and in laymen's terms, the Radiation Continuum Model of electromagnetic radiation. From this simple and elegant replacement to Einstein's second postulate of light, RCM is shown to eliminate the entire basis for special relativity, including time dilation, length contraction, relative simultaneity and mass increase with velocity. As a result, the basis for general relativity is also stricken, and it is demonstrated that the universe indeed behaves according to Galilean ideas of distance, time, velocity and mass"

This is a very common problem, see that everyone fails to implement the sieve properly here despite the README being very clear on the fact you should not use division operations.

Yep, balance is restricted. Full list here:

https://magic.wizards.com/en/game-info/gameplay/rules-and-formats/banned-restricted#vintage

You know some of those cards are worth real money, right? Saphire mox is like $1700 currently.

https://archive.is/Ktojn

So now this is an invalid argument according to this person:

Suppose x=2. Then x - x = x-2 = 2-2 = 0

(yes it is long-winded)

Edit: The bad thing is that it was upvoted before the replies started coming. :(

Edit2: Ah well at least he isn't obstinate. Was hoping to net an easy crank!

It's not working, you're comparing strings to int so no matter the input it never replies "yes" except when lying.

Here's a fixed version: https://repl.it/repls/VeneratedShadowyInvisiblerail I also fixed the question numbers.

Thank you! The simplest explanation I've seen so far.

I even demonstrated this with a somewhat lazily created but still relevant simulation but people seem so convinced that it's a fallacy that they're not even trying to learn.

Lazy Simulation of Golden Plays

This text has several examples if you're interested in some more intensive reading:

https://www.amazon.com/Zoo-Counting-Book-Eric-Carle/dp/0399230130/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=counting+children%27s+book&qid=1629685622&sr=8-3

I suggest you take a look at existing literature on the matter. Here, for example, the abstract specifically claims that such algorithms likely exist. I think you're giving the people working on this vastly less credit than they are due. A probabilistic solution is just as good in this case, by the way, since P = NP implies P = BPP.

> Now I'm simply left wondering if you have completely failed to understand me at all. "There exists a piece of good music" is not a decision problem

Sorry, I should have been clearer. An NP set is a set of the form { x | exists polynomial-size y. M(x, y) } where M is a polynomial-time Turing machine. A (constructive, etc.) proof of P = NP would allow, for any NP set A and x in A, to find a corresponding y. Given a recognition algorithm M for good music you can take the set { x | exists polynomial-size y. M(y) } and then use the above to find a y, thereby getting good music. Again, I'm addressing /u/jywn4679 's objection here, not yours. If you don't have an algorithm, you're out of luck.

> My grandfather (a physicist) believed that fluid dynamics would only see progress with more women in the field because male thinking was inherently "rigid" (because penis?).

Sokal & Bricmont savaged Julia Kristeva for exactly that kind of thinking, i. e. feminine/fluid, &c. But she is a "French intellectual" (well, Bulgarian-French) not a physicist. 😮

> I believe that to truly take something to the limit requires an infinite amount of time.

Given quite how many people have computed limits in finite times, you are obviously wrong.

> I don't believe that task could be completed and so a computer assigned this task would never output a number.

This too, is obviously false: here's a computer programme that computes such a limit:

import timeit from sympy import * start = timeit.timeit() x = symbols('x') expr = sin(x)/x; print("Expression : {}".format(expr))
limit_expr = limit(expr, x, 0)
print("Limit of the expression tends to 0 : {}".format(limit_expr))
end = timeit.timeit() print(end-start)

You can run it for yourself here, and note that it completes in much less than one second.

Let me guess, you too are conflating identity with equality.

A thing is identical as it self, a thing needs not be equal to itself.
https://repl.it/@LogikLogicus/DodgerblueCorruptMouse

I would've thought it's kinda intuitive. I sure don't know what it means if I were to say "I am equal to myself".
It must be like the meaning of life, the universe and everything ;)

Nah, it's not that you're too old at 27, it's that if you learn math from this 8-book series, starting at age 5, you'll have learned everything by age 26. The first book covers school math, ages 5-18, then it goes a year or two at a time.

They're free with Kindle Unlimited! How could you not take advantage of this great offer?!

https://www.overleaf.com/16262731mdqtrxmgbffq#/62259732/

See this link here for my proof that 0.9 repeating is 1. (I proved this for any base p, actually, so this works for base 2,3, etc as well). If you need me to explain some part of it don’t hesitate to ask.

I'm confused. Coq's "built in" logic is constructive, not classical. You can implement classical logic in Coq (as is done in the sandard library).

If you heavily constrain the system, you can get an analytical solution (usually Particle Innabox is the first one students see), or if you have an extremely simple system like hydrogen or a highly ionized atom (read: only one nucleus and one electron).

But we've known about those for years and they're all fairly trivial compared to what theoretical chemists are looking for. Ultimately, what we want to calculate is where the electrons are in a system, because that gives us a lot of information about the system (whether it's a small molecule, a big molecule, a chunk of metal, etc) and its properties.

You don't directly solve the schrodinger equation for any system of practical interest. Instead, one of the more popular methods is to use a set of methods lumped under "Density-Functional Theory," which is more or less trying to solve for a representation of the electron density rather than individual electrons. There's also a few other, older methods out there like Hartree-Fock where the assumption is that there is some single wavefunction that can represent all electrons in a system, but as a result the method can't account for electron-electron interactions. There's also newer methods out there called Post-Hartree-Fock where they try to take into account some electron-electron interactions (called electron correlation). I'm not as familiar with them as I am with DFT, but I know they tend to be more expensive to run, but also tend to be more accurate than DFT.

If you're interested in DFT, here's a really good book to get started on it. It's intended more as an introduction for newcomers, and those who want a working knowledge of it, but it also has a bunch of book and paper recommendations in it, as well as a bunch of analogies to describe how it all works.

> Anyway, that's enough ranting from me. Statistics has definitely left a bad taste in my mouth. Any suggestions for semi-rigorous introductory stats books?

Perhaps not introductory, but David Cox wrote a very clear and thorough book on statistical inference which you might find helpful.

It's not going to be very satisfying for you. Bayesian games just mean players have different information at various point of time. So posterior beliefs are formulated using bayes rule.

Auman wrote a paper about the rational beliefs and common priors in this famous paper

http://www.dklevine.com/archive/refs4512.pdf

For learning about Bayesian Nash Equilibrium, pretty much any Game Theory text will have it (upper level undergrad). Obsborne is probably the most popular one http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Game-Theory-Martin-Osborne/dp/0195128958

I personally like Harrington who I find does a good job with Bayesian NE.

But any book covering Harsanyi and Selton (games of incomplete information)