As nearly always, there is a relevant xkcd.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.
There's a whole bit in The Incredibles about how math has changed since Bob was in school
That was probably inspired by the USA's crappy national curriculum system of forcing kids to learn and use the lattice method which is 100% some sort of scam to make it look like math illiterate children are passing class and failing upwards.
I mean seriously, we've been using base 10 arab system for a millenia, but you're trying to tell me the department of education came up with a better method of drawing a damn chi square matrix abomination that makes even the two millenia old roman numeral system look good in comparison.
I love that Eratosthenes was able to estimate the circumference of the earth with the amount of math we had in his era. Meanwhile, modern flat-earthers are still making me want to vomit.
I used to see fractals in the shadows on LSD. I couldn’t think of the word “fractal,” and told my friend, “You know, that thing in math?” And he said to me, “When you trip you see math?!” Fun times. To be a teen again.
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The really funny part is the other two are also just math.
The fabric of reality is woven from math, and that's beautiful.
I've got a pet theory that a hypothetical alien species' music would be more recognizably similar to humans' than their biology would.
This could make the plot of a great sci-fi book. Love the idea.
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That $300 stack of the cheapest thin paper was last semester. The online code you need for class is void, and the questions won't match the answer key.
Physics books are never outdated, you just discover better models that work in a wider range of conditions.
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Math is a thought game with axioms as rules. It’s much more stable since the rules are “self-evident”.
Fuck you professor, its a 35 line proof, and it isn't as trivial as you think it is!
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The correct way to learn math is chronologically
Wrong. Good look fooling around without algebra for years. New methods make old maths easy.
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Start with set theory. After about 300 pages you'll be able to show what 1+1 equals.
To be fair, the first 100 pages of that was justifying the set theory definition for what numbers are. The following two hundred papers are proving that a process of iterative counting we call addition functions in a consistent and useful way, given the set theory way of defining numbers. Once we get to that point, 1+1 is easy. Then we get to start talking more deeply about iteration as a process, leading to considering iterating addition (aka multiplication), iterating multiplication (aka exponents), etc. But that stuff is for the next thousand pages.
Remember, 0 is defined as the amount of things in the empty set {}. 1 is defined as the amount of things in a set containing the empty set {{}}. Each following natural number is defined as the amount of things in a set containing each of the previous nonnegative integers. So for example 2 is the amount of things in a set containing the empty set and a set containing the empty set {{}, {{}}}, 3 is the amount of things in a set containing the empty set, a set containing the empty set, and a set containing the empty set and a set containing the empty set {{}, {{}}, {{}, {{}}}}, etc. All natural numbers are just counting increasingly recursively labeled nothing. Welcome to math.
Weird flex
You could make the same argument for things like mathematics before the discovery about imaginary numbers.
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