There have been some claims that the numberphile video is very misrepresentative of the underlying math. But I never dug deep enough into it.
Comment on $1$
Klear@piefed.world 6 hours agoOh, good. There’s a Numberphile video on it linked at the end. That gives me much better odds of understanding this than just reading the article.
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 6 hours ago
PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@anarchist.nexus 6 hours ago
Actually, the Numberphile video is notorious for lacking mathematical rigor. Mathologer did a video on it. IMO, it’s really really important to explain the difference between what’s going on here (assigning a number to a divergent series) and what we ordinarily do (computing the limit of a sequence of partial sums).
i_love_FFT@jlai.lu 1 hour ago
There was a full on mathematical war on YouTube, with numberphile coming back later to show that most partial sum methods also end up at -1/12.
As a science nerd, mathologer basically just took the camp of “old concensus” and gave no other argument than “this is alien math, nope, I don’t like it”. It just felt like mathologer was Pythagoras fighting against irrational numbers…