[ExI] favor for a friend

spike at rainier66.com spike at rainier66.com
Wed Mar 24 17:28:15 UTC 2021


 

 

…> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: [ExI] favor for a friend

 

He wanted to know the meaning of this statement:

 

Mathematics is true, but it doesn't exist."

 

bill w

 

 

 

Bill it is a mathematician’s joke, a little self-referencing humor.  Pure mathematics is all about proving theorems.  There are many mathematical ideas called conjectures until they are proven.  An example is the conjecture that an odd perfect number exists.  Plenty of people agree that one is true, but we have no known way of finding it, nor is there a proof that it exists (or doesn’t exist.)

 

I chose that example because I worked on it for a while, but found myself not smart enough by a coupla orders of magnitude.  A better example is the Riemann hypothesis:

 

In mathematics, the Riemann hypothesis is a  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjecture> conjecture that the  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_zeta_function> Riemann zeta function has its  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_of_a_function> zeros only at the negative even integers and  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number> complex numbers with  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_part> real part 1/2.

 

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

 

That one is true, but no one has ever been able to prove it.  That a proof doesn’t exist is more remarkable than my example with odd perfect numbers because math graduate students are given instruction on the Riemann zeta function and plenty of them take a shot it.  But the zeta shoots back, hard.  The fusillade of return fire is awesome on that one.

 

Do feel free to forward what I have written to your friend.

 

spike

 

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