[ExI] favor for a friend

[William Flynn Wallace]

Thanks.  Now - what is an odd perfect number?  For that matter - never mind
-looked it up.  No practical applications in mind, just play, right?

This part of math is not a science.  You know the Riemann conjecture to be
true but cannot prove it - just backwards from science.   bill w

On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 12:32 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> *…*> *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
> *Subject:* [ExI] favor for a friend
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> He wanted to know the meaning of this statement:
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> Mathematics is true, but it doesn't exist."
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> bill w
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> 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.)
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> 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:
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> In mathematics, the *Riemann hypothesis* is a conjecture
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjecture> that the Riemann zeta function
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_zeta_function> has its zeros
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_of_a_function> only at the negative
> even integers and complex numbers
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number> with real part
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_part> 1/2.
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> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis
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> 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.
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> Do feel free to forward what I have written to your friend.
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> spike
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