I'll start: exponentiation should be left-associative, which means a^b should mean b×b×...×b } a times.
Interesting. Why?
this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
34 points (87.0% liked)
Ask Lemmy
31802 readers
1074 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Everyone keeps talking about pi r²
This doesn't make any sense because pies are round. Brownies are square
Mixed numbers fraction syntax [1] is the dumbest funking thing ever. Juxtaposition of a number in front of any expression implies multiplication! Addition? Fucking addition? What the fuck is wrong with you?
Amen. Pick a lane either they're both additive or multiplicative. Maybe a different symbol.
I have never made that connection before but I think you're 100% right!
Great one!
Some of the more complex proofs might be wrong just because so few understand them, and the ones who do might have made mistakes.
Hell, I’ll trust a math result much more if it’s backed up by empirical evidence from eg. engineering or physics.
Don’t know if that counts as being ”in math” by OPs definition.
“Terryology may have some merits and deserves consideration.”
I don’t hold this opinion, but I can guarantee you it’s unpopular.
Who did ever say that? Not a single article that I've read about Terryology has praised it. I guess the Joe Rogan podcast helped it gather some followers?
I believe that the polar plot of prime numbers that reveals spirals and rays and when extended out to millions of numbers shows deeper fractals and geometric patterns is a glimpse into the structure of something we haven't yet discovered.
Maybe it's the higher dimensional structure of a photon, maybe it's something we don't even know about, but the fact that math describes everything in our universe EXCEPT prime numbers sounds like nonsense. There's something staring us right in the face that we can't see yet.
Most real-world phenomena would be better represented as regular Directed Graphs than Directed Acyclic Graphs, even ones that are traditionally abstracted as DAGs.
P vs NP can be solved, and is within P. Good luck proving it though, I'm not smart enough
-
I have this odd, perhaps part troll, feeling that there are two, and only two, roots of the Riemann Zeta function that aren't on the critical line, and are instead mirrors of each other at either side of it, like some weird pair of complex conjugates. Further, while I really want their real parts to be 1/4 and 3/4, the actual variance from 1/2 will be some inexplicable irrational number.
-
Multiplication order in current mathematics standards should happen the other way around when it's in a non-commutative algebra. I think this because transfinite multiplication apparently requires the transfinite part to go before any finite part to prevent collapse of meaning. For example, we can't write 2ω for the next transfinite ordinal because 2ω is just ω again on account of transfinite and backwards multiplication weirdness, and we have to write ω·2 or ω×2 instead like we're back at primary school.
Multiplication order in current mathematics standards should happen the other way around when it’s in a non-commutative algebra.
The good thing about multiplication being commutative and associative is that you can think about it either way (e.g. 3x2 can be thought of as "add two three times). The "benefit" of carrying this idea to higher-order operations is that they become left-associative (meaning they can be evaluated from left to right), which is slightly more intuitive. For instance in lambda calculus, a sequence of church numerals n~1~ n~2~ ... n~K~ mean n~K~ ^ n~K-1~ ^ ... ^ n~1~ in traditional notation.
For example, we can’t write 2ω for the next transfinite ordinal because 2ω is just ω again on account of transfinite and backwards multiplication weirdness, and we have to write ω·2 or ω×2 instead like we’re back at primary school.
I'd say the deeper issue with ordinal arithmetic is that Knuth's up-arrow notation with its recursive definition becomes useless to define ordinals bigger than ε~0~, because something like ω^(ω^^ω) = ω^ε0^ = ε~0~. I don't understand the exact notion deeply yet, but I suspect there's some guilt in the fact that hyperoperations are fundamentally right-associative.
1 should be a prime number.
It was once, but got kicked out due to new discoveries and equations I'm not smart/mathematically trained enough to understand.
1 got Pluto-ed?!
I prefer the term "got Ceresed", but yes. That's happened.
Matrix multiplication should be the other way around, i.e. not like cascading functions. Oh and function cabbages should also be the other way around :) i prefer to read it not like a manga