#mathematicals

[roach-works]

speculative fiction writers i am going to give you a really urgent piece of advice: don't say numbers. don't give your readers any numbers. how heavy is the sword? lots. how old is that city? plenty. how big is the fort? massive. how fast is the spaceship? not very, it's secondhand.

the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don't let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.

you are lying to people for fun. if you let them do math at you the lie collapses and it's no fun anymore.

[copepods]

crazy how 4 hours of work will literally take up my entire 15+ hour day. who allowed this

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[prokopetz]

Did you see that Magic: the Gathering now has a game state in which you need to prove that there are an infinite number of twin primes to win? I can explain it more if you are interested.

(With reference to this post here.)

By all means, please tell us about the Magic: the Gathering combo which requires proving the twin prime conjecture in order to win.

[sleepy-bebby]

[uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh]

He's right tho

[here-by-chance]

im obsessed

[demonicseries]

You guys are never gonna believe what the name of this sculpture is

[jedi-starbird]

Palpatine: My boy, I'm afraid to report that Master Kenobi is very likely sleeping with your wife.

Anakin, who knows for a fact that Obi-Wan is sleeping with his Commander, a good chunk of Ghost company, the Organas and Quinlan Vos: ...where is he finding the fucking time???

Palpatine, oblivious: Oh I've heard from some very reliable sources that-

Anakin: *pulls out a spexcel spreadsheet, the 3rd System Army's shared spoogle calender and a calculator*

Anakin: Your Excellency. That's just. not logistically possible.

[r4nd0br3d]

Mathematicals ✨️

[nolinno-art]

I've developed mathematics for a non-human mind, for my comic "The book written by tiny paws"

Sapient distant descendants of rats, known as packers, living on Earth millions of years after the extinction of humans, began to develop mathematics using cognitive mechanisms never intended for such tasks. Due to an evolutionary quirk, multiplication came more naturally to them than addition, and their mathematics reflects this.

Packers write numbers as shapes, with each number having a corresponding number of corners.

And they write large numbers as nested shapes. The number inside is multiplied by the number outside.

Examples of some numbers:

Packers haven't invented 0 yet. They haven't even invented 1! In fact, they don’t need the concept of "one" much in their system. There's no need to say "I ate one fish" when they can simply say "I ate fish".

Packers can't yet write large prime numbers, like 101 or 10,501, because they would have to draw a huge shape to represent them! Even writing 17 or 19 would be quite difficult if they only used convex shapes.

So packers use non-convex shapes too!

Many years later, some packer noticed that large prime numbers look suspiciously symmetric.

So this packer improved the notation system and made it clearer.

Later, another packer simplified this system even more, deciding that there was no point in writing the same shapes twice.

This packer was the first in their culture to declare that "a dot isolated from a number" should also be considered a number. The packer called this dot "the wonderful number that's less than two".

Many years later, another packer made an important innovation: the "dot isolation" could be repeated multiple times as long as the result remained odd. When the result became even, it could undergo a "two isolation" (division by two). The final result will be a series of dots and twos.

This invention led to the creation of a binary system based on one and two, which had a significant impact on the technological advancement of packers.

The comic "the book written by tiny paws" talks about all of this in more detail. There will be mistakes, debates, the invention of rational, irrational, multivariate numbers, and some other stuff. Some stuff will be very much like human math, and some will be different. After all, math is still math, only the point of view has changed.

[h0bg0blin-meat]

Here's the link to the video

👏 SAY 👏 IT 👏 LOUDER 👏

[myjetpack]

My latest New Scientist cartoon

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[todays-xkcd]

Look, you can't complain about this after giving us so many scenarios involving N locked chests and M unlabeled keys.

D&D Combinatorics [Explained]

Transcript

[Cueball, Megan, Ponytail, White Hat, and Knit Cap are sitting at a table. Everyone is looking at Cueball. Ponytail is facepalming. The table is covered in sheets of paper and assorted dice.] Cueball: I grab 2 of the 10 arrows without looking and fire them, hoping I didn't grab one of the 5 cursed ones. Did I? Ponytail: Sigh. Umm. Okay. Ponytail: Roll... Uh... Hang on... Ponytail: Roll 3d6 and a d4. You need... 16 or better to avoid the cursed arrows.

[Caption below the panel:] I got way more annoying to play D&D with once I learned that our DM has a combinatorics degree and can't resist puzzles.