this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
620 points (97.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35809 readers
1531 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)

Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.

Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.

Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.

Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.

Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.

Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.

Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.

Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.

Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
ja2@lemmy.world
_MoveSwiftly@lemmy.world
Rooki@lemmy.world
Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world
automodbeta@lemmy.world
L3s@lemmy.world
620
What are the most mindblowing things in mathematics? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by cll7793@lemmy.world to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
231 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

What concepts or facts do you know from math that is mind blowing, awesome, or simply fascinating?

Here are some I would like to share:

  • Gödel's incompleteness theorems: There are some problems in math so difficult that it can never be solved no matter how much time you put into it.
  • Halting problem: It is impossible to write a program that can figure out whether or not any input program loops forever or finishes running. (Undecidablity)

The Busy Beaver function

Now this is the mind blowing one. What is the largest non-infinite number you know? Graham's Number? TREE(3)? TREE(TREE(3))? This one will beat it easily.

  • The Busy Beaver function produces the fastest growing number that is theoretically possible. These numbers are so large we don't even know if you can compute the function to get the value even with an infinitely powerful PC.
  • In fact, just the mere act of being able to compute the value would mean solving the hardest problems in mathematics.
  • Σ(1) = 1
  • Σ(4) = 13
  • Σ(6) > 10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10 (10s are stacked on each other)
  • Σ(17) > Graham's Number
  • Σ(27) If you can compute this function the Goldbach conjecture is false.
  • Σ(744) If you can compute this function the Riemann hypothesis is false.

Sources:

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] _g_be@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I find the easiest way to understand Monty Hall is to think of it in a meta way:

Situation A - A person picks one of three doors, 1 n 3 chance of success.

Situation B - A person picks one of two doors, 1 in 2 chance of success.

If you were an observer of these two situations (not the person choosing doors) and you were gonna bet on which situation will more often succeed, clearly the second choice.

[–] zenharbinger@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But the issue is that by switching doors, you have a 66% chance of winning, it doesn't drop to 50% just because there are 2 doors, it's still 33% on the first door, 66% on the other doors (as a whole), for which we know one is not correct and won't choose.

[–] _g_be@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

on the whole

is the key words here

individually the door has that 1:2 chance, but the scenario has more context and information and thus better odds. Choosing scenario B over scenario A is a better wager

[–] zenharbinger@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

you aren't talking about the Monty Hall problem then

[–] natanael@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Only to somebody who didn't know about the choice being made!

[–] KarmaTrainCaboose@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I don't understand how this relates to the problem. Yes 50 percent is greater than 33 percent, but that's not what the Monty hall problem is about. The point of the exercise is to show that when the game show host knowingly (and it is important to state that the host knows where the prize is) opens a door, he is giving the contestant 33 percent extra odds.