What do you mean by independent? There is no more general and independent notion of ordering than a less-than operator. The article above oulines a mathematical proof that no such definition exists in a consistent way for the complex numbers.
A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer are led into a long room. At the other end stands a beautiful naked woman. “When I ring this bell,” she says" you may cross half the space between us. When I ring the bell again, you may again cross half the space between us." Both the mathematician and physicist groan and wander off. “Ah, it’s Zeno’s paradox, we can never actually reach her.” The engineer, waiting for the bell, says “I think I can get close enough.”
yeah but like, you don’t need to specify that one individual is naked. If that’s a required factoid of the statement, the engineer, mathematician, and physicist should also be naked. But there’s no mention of that.
Now i don’t have much experience in relationships, particularly inter personal ones, but to my knowledge, you are generally clothed most of the time.
You are overthinking it. This is just a premise to setup the joke that an engineer deals with approximation while the other two give up because they’ll never reach 0.
It could be a bowl of ice cream for all that matters, but people like corny jokes, so that’s it.
Is it really that confusing? If it had said there was a pot of gold the implication is clear that the person who reaches it will be rich. You ask “why a nude woman?” and the answer is simply because, just like being rich, desiring a sexual partner is a common desire.
I don’t think it’s the same joke when it’s three turtles or a goat, because the joke is “I think I can get close enough…to engage in unspecified sex acts with this woman.”
You think the same chemicals that turned the frickin frogs gay is responsible for this aversion to sexual thoughts? “Could it not be a naked woman? That clutches my pearls.”
“I think I can get close enough…to engage in unspecified sex acts with this woman.”
that’s what i would assume, but then again it never states anything, so this is like walking into a fucking storage shed and seeing a colonoscopy going on. It’s just fucking weird.
The mathematician is naked, something about pure and direct truth. The physicist is wearing a bow tie, chippendale cuffs and a banana hammock. The engineer has on his new invention: Assful chaps.
Only straight men are mathematicians, physicists and engineers. This is why the joke is framed this way.
See: responses from OP, valiantly defending his choice to “piss people off”, instead of noticing the joke is just yet another reminder that men are default.
After all, sexism is over, and STEM isn’t hostile to women/non-heteronormative people. It’s all in our head.
Hi there friend, I am here to inform you that many woman also like the titty. Gay girls exist my friend, and the gender of the three professionals is never specified.
I’ll assume ya ain’t trying to be homophobic my buddy but I hope you keep that in mind for future refference.
Edit racism comment was another guy, sorry, very tired
I’m not going to spend much time engaging with your comment because you didn’t read mine well.
I did not mention race.
I included mention of gay folks (see non-heteronormative). The “joke” doesn’t work unless the stem major desires being very close to a naked woman, so I don’t find your mention of gay men to make sense.
You did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a nationalism. You did a xenophobia. You did a white fragility. You did a weak apology. You did no growth. This makes it abundantly clear you don’t understand the intersectional nature of the multiplicity of your offenses
When taking about limits, you can approach 0 from the positive or negative direction, which can give very different results. For example, lim cotx, x->0+ = ∞ while lim cotx, x->0- = -∞
I mean it’s an algebra, isn’t it? And it definitely was mathematicians who came up with the thing. In the same way that artists didn’t come up with the CGI colour palette.
You probably are familiar with the thing, just not under that name, and not as a subject of mathematical study. I am aware that there are, at least in theory, mathematicians never expanding beyond pen+paper (and that’s fine) but TBH they’re getting kinda rare. The last time you fired up Julia you probably used them, R, possibly, Coq, it’d actually be a surprise.
They’re most widely known to trip up newbie programmers, causing excessive bug hunts and then a proud bug report stating “0.1 + 0.2 /= 0.3, that’s wrong”, to which the reply will be “nope, that’s exactly as the spec says”. The solution, to people who aren’t numerologists, is to sprinkle gratuitous amounts of epsilons everywhere.
It’s a wonderful world where 1 / 0 is ∞ and 1 / -0 is -∞, making a lot of high school teachers very very mad. OTOH it’s also a very strange world where x = y does not imply 1 / x = 1 / y. But it is, very emphatically, an algebra.
Mostly it’s pure numerology, at least from the POV of most of the people using it.
I’m aware. Algebra is what I’m most interested in, and so when someone says “0” I think “additive identity of a ring” unless context makes the use obvious.
Edit: I’ve given it some thought, and I’m not convinced all algebras can fit in a set, because every non-empty set can have at least one algebra imposed upon them, and so the set of all algebras must have cardinality no less than the proper class of all sets. We also can’t have a set of all algebras (up to isomorphism) because iirc the surreal numbers are an algebra imposed on a structure that itself incorporates a proper class, and is thus incapable of being a set element.
Yes, mathematically it’s the same, but in physics there’s a guy named Heisenberg who denies that 0.99999… really gets to 1. There is always this difference, for a mathematician infinite is not a problem, but for a physicist it is, plus a very big one.
Specifically I was referring to standard float representation which permits signed zeros. However, other comments provide some interesting examples also.
And, as a mathematician who has been coding a library to create scaled geometric graphics for his paper, I hate -0.0.
Seriously, I run every number where sign determines action through a function I call “fix_zero” just because tiny tiny rounding errors pile up in floats, even is numpy.
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