Comment on Statistically unlikely

a14o@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• toynbee@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  My brother has a PhD in pure mathematics. Sometimes I get in trouble (yes, hyperbole) with him because, while I’m pretty decent at arithmetic and I like numbers, he knows so much more about either than I do. For example, I recently said that 57 was a boring number (I tried to connect it to 17, which I like, but was thinking of 19, which is fine) and learned quite a lot from both him and some lemmings.

  Another time I told him that I thought there was debate about whether 2 was prime and got quite a lecture on the nature of primality.

  Point I’m trying to make is, give at least some math graduates at least some credit.

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  • Dozzi92@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Is the amount of credit I should give them less than, equal to, or greater than the amount of credit I should give English majors?

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    • toynbee@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I suppose it depends on what you value. Language is more of a creative venture while math is more of a technical one. “Credit” is also somewhat of a nebulous term.

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      • tempest@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I don’t know, once math becomes Greek letters and mathematician names it sort of seems to circle back around.

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    • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      majors? you mean bachelors? PhDs get PhD respect. Bachelors get Bachelor respect. It’s not the subclassification of study, it’s the level. if you only have a bachelors, you get less respect than a masters and so on.

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  • kogasa@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Gotta add context for readers.

    Of all the numbers to call boring you picked the Grothendieck prime.

    2 is unambiguously prime. The best motivation for the definition of primality I know is the fundamental theorem of arithmetic: every integer greater than 1 can be uniquely decomposed into a product of primes. That’s what primes are, and the uniqueness constraint is why 1 is not prime.

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    • tias@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      the uniqueness constraint is why 1 is not prime.

      There’s more than one way to multiply numbers to get 1?

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      • kogasa@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        1, 11, 11*1, etc

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    • toynbee@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Are you my brother?

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