Posted on 10/12/2015 3:59:01 PM PDT by LibWhacker
I always scored very high on math. Typically 99th percentile. However I saw this theory discussed on TV a year or two back and did not ever understand what they were talking about. It had something to do with a doughnut shape.
Of course I now do simple math on a calculator as it is just too hard now that I am 68.
It's incredible... A proof hundreds of pages long, much of it involving a new and difficult area or form of mathematics no one has ever seen before, all extensively developed by one guy without the benefit of any kind of peer input.
The guy's got a big brass pair is all I've got to say. I mean, one little subtle oversight and ten years of work goes up in flames. Major embarrassment. Hari-Kari time.
Sweet flick. I actually preferred Chas over Jason Melon. Rodney’s kid was a whining loser.
Know the feeling, I have the same problem when trying to understand the concept of Cold Heat.
Fermat’s Last Theorem is the most famous modern (since 1600) long-unsolved problem. He actually did write that in the margin of a book.
It was finally solved a few years ago.
Another modern problem was to find the roots of the general fifth-degree or higher polynomial by basic algebraic operations and taking roots. It was shown impossible in the 19th century.
Famous ancient problems would be trisecting the angle and duplicating the cube by compass and straight-edge, which were proved to be impossible in the 19th century.
Another ancient problem was to construct the regular septagon with compass and straight-edge, which Gauss did.
Ted Kaczynski was good at Math.
Thank you Muddog, now I understand what the article is about and it’s importance.
Har, Har...
Maybe he has Asperger’s syndrome and won’t care ;^)
I was just over generalizing and being the typical smartass that I am. I understand that I can’t even begin to understand his proof. I’m educated in Mathematics, but nowhere remotely near anything like this.
The doughnut might have been the Poincare Conjecture (solved by Perelman, mentioned in the article).
Yep, use it or lose it, they say. But now that I am 67, I can see it’s more than not using it. The old gray matter just doesn’t work as well as it used to. Not by a long shot. And using it constantly on math wouldn’t have helped. :-(
Utterly fascinating. I learned about something I knew nothing about. That he may have created a new form of mathematics is...wow.
I did the math and...it WORKS!!!
It's the regular heptadecagon, i.e. 17 sides. The heptagon, or septagon, is inconstructible, with 7 sides, as is the nonagon (9).
Also Gauss didn't actually devise a construction. He just proved it was possible as the length a side in terms of the radius of circumscribing circle is "solvable in radicals". Actually, it's very interesting, and I've been studying it. You can quickly find animated versions of actual constructions on the internet.
“...can you sum up this article in a paragraph that makes sense to someone without a 180 IQ?”
Yes, I second that request.
Yep, we might be talking about Isaac Newton level genius here. Newton was working on planetary orbits, I think, when he recognized that the math he knew was insufficient. So he invented calculus.
dyslexic - - - “Algebra”
Would that be “BRA” “Algae”?
Sounds icky.
Something about Earth being destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
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