Science and Math!

that's a hell of a necro

You can't even write racist abuse in excrement on somebody's car without the politically correct brigade jumping down your throat!

It is an epic bit of resurrection, that's for sure.

Hmmmm... about the only thing dividing the "softer" sciences from the hard... is the effect of organic chemistry on the supposedly hard stuff.

That, and time away from Daddy Philosophy. Less time away means less maths that isn't simply statistics, apparently. <shrugs>

Don't forget about biochemistry.

The asteroid was populated by spherical cows.

I am interested in all of them to some degree, actually. They all teach how this world operates.

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

I think my planet may have populated by a few computer scientists as well.

Possibly good news for those who hate doing math, as new research shows that for some people, the thought of doing math problems is actually physically painful:

I wonder if there will be a follow-up study to see if people can overcome or channel this fear of math. We need more scientists and fewer "scientists".

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

I can see that being the case. Taking up a math article, or doing math myself, definitely feels like a struggle to me — far more than studying other, just as intellectually demanding disciplines. I'm not entirely sure why that is the case; but I certainly experience that myself.

In a way, that's what attracts me towards mathematics. You know that feeling when you pick up a proof or a paper, struggle through the whole "aargh, that cannot possibly make sense to me and thinking about it is hurting my brain" phase, and then you end up dominating it, and the argument becomes crystal-clear? Yeah, that feeling is great.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I wonder if this also has something to do with the fact people are conditioned from near the day they enter school to see math as scary.

Carcy: I know that feel. :3

Midget: Yeah, probably. :o

ᐅᖃᐅᓯᖅ ᐊᑕᐅᓯᖅ ᓈᒻᒪᔪᐃᑦᑐᖅ

Remember kiddies, pain is weakness leaving the body, you don't want to be a wuss do you?

Part of the problem, at least from what I remember, is the transition stage between when a formula was a way to get an answer, and when a formula was a defined relationship you could use to get an answer.

@ Midget, blame the writers who can't do math for projecting their inferiority.

Fight smart, not fair.

It is a paradox. Due to write what you know, writers are vastly overrepresented among characters. Where are the people who find writing painful?

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

Its not just writers. I know a joke around the college theatre professors is that half their students are EBM. Everything But Math

I love all science.

It's really amazing to think of simple things and how they really work..

The same place smart characters who don't want to be a hero are, in the back ground.

Fight smart, not fair.

TO-PO-LO-GY TO-PO-LO-GY

Topology is cool. Freaky, but definitely cool.

Did you hear about that time when van Kampen — one of the greatest topologists of the last century: unfortunately he died very young, but he proved some seriously impressive results — sought admittance to the United States? Apparently, when the immigration officers asked him about his occupation, he answered "topologist"; and when they asked him what a topologist is, he started giving them a lecture about the fundamental definitions and aims of topology.

Well, long story short, he got arrested on suspicion of mental illness, until professors of the university that had invited him in the U.S. gave their guarantee that he was not a nut, only a mathematician (not that the two categories do not intersect, of course ).

edited 9th Nov '12 10:52:39 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

On the subject of topology, here's a cool database. It has a bunch of counterexamples in topology, including all the classical ones from Steen and Seebach, and you can look them up by any combination of properties.

I'm starting to get a little bit into pointless geometry — that is, geometrical theories in which you don't have a notion of "point" but only a notion of "region of space".

It's a cool subject, with an even cooler name — I mean, it's also called point-free geometry, but who would pass the possibility of calling oneself a student of pointless geometry?

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

So, what exactly is the point of not having points?

(Yeah, I had to make the joke, but I am genuinely curious.)

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

Well, the concept of geometric point is very much a theoretical abstraction — a very useful and natural one, no doubt, but an abstraction nonetheless. There is no such thing as a geometrical point in Real Life: I am certainly not capable of drawing an object with no dimensions on a piece of paper, for example. Furthermore, there are no true pointlike objects in physics, at least that I know of: if I am not mistaken, even the smallest known particles occupy regions of space, although in a wobbly, quantumphysicsy sort of way.

However, the notion of point is pretty much a fundamental ingredient of the better known variants of geometry, included of course the ones which are used in physics. Of course, nothing prevents you from taking a geometry with points and then working only with regions of space, defined as sets of points; but still, it is interesting to see what happens if you don't have points to begin with instead. We have a pretty good (although not entirely complete yet) theory of the kinds of spaces that you can get in a pointed framework: what are they point-free analogues? In which ways can you fold and twist a pointless space? What connections can you establish between pointed and pointless geometries?

There is one aspect that interests me in particular at the moment. It is known that in the standard, pointed framework, even with respect to plain old three-dimensional euclidean geometry, you cannot assign a value to the volumes of all sets of points — there must be non-measurable sets, whose volume is undefined.

This is kind of bizarre in itself, and it has really freaky consequences: for example, the Banach-Tarski Paradox*

, which says that you can take one three-dimensional ball, split into non-measurable parts, move and rotate them around, and end up with two three-dimensional balls, each one of the same size of the one you started with. One thing I'm wondering about at the moment — but to be honest, I'm just starting to explore what other people have done on the topic, so it may well be a dumb idea — is if pointless geometries can be used to prevent this in an elegant and consistent way.

There are some versions of pointless geometry, but it's fair to say that this is a fringe topic about which relatively little has been done so far; which is just fine for me, because it means that there might be open problems about them that are not actually all that hard to solve

edited 27th Nov '12 8:40:09 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I admit at least a few of my professors in art have expressed at least some surprise why I'm interested in art when I can also understand the concepts behind relativity and space-time among other concepts.

I guess a lot of people just aren't interested in every subject?

My history textbook had a chapter on the history of natural science, and it was probably the most interesting thing we've discussed in that class, save maybe Joan of Arc.

edited 4th Dec '12 5:48:01 PM by Haldo

‽‽‽‽ ^These are interrobangs. Love them. Learn them. Use them.

Finishing up a course right now in Discrete Mathematics, and I have to say, it's some of the coolest stuff I've ever learned. Hard as crap, but really cool. Graph theory, combinatorics, all kinds of wacky stuff I never would have thought I'd learn in a math class.

edited 8th Dec '12 12:55:30 PM by ToxicInfinity

Heroes don't exist. And if they did, I wouldn't be one of them.

Why wouldn't you expect to learn combinatorics or graph theory in a math class? Those are pretty major areas of study.