Skip Navigation
No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world cll7793 @lemmy.world

What are the most mindblowing things in mathematics?

What concepts or facts do you know from math that is mind blowing, awesome, or simply fascinating?

Here are some I would like to share:

  • Gödel's incompleteness theorems: There are some problems in math so difficult that it can never be solved no matter how much time you put into it.
  • Halting problem: It is impossible to write a program that can figure out whether or not any input program loops forever or finishes running. (Undecidablity)

The Busy Beaver function

Now this is the mind blowing one. What is the largest non-infinite number you know? Graham's Number? TREE(3)? TREE(TREE(3))? This one will beat it easily.

  • The Busy Beaver function produces the fastest growing number that is theoretically possible. These numbers are so large we don't even know if you can compute the function to get the value even with an infinitely powerful PC.
  • In fact, just the mere act of being able to compute the value would mean solving the hardest problems in mathematics.
  • Σ(1) = 1
  • Σ(4) = 13
  • Σ(6) > 101010101010101010101010101010 (10s are stacked on each other)
  • Σ(17) > Graham's Number
  • Σ(27) If you can compute this function the Goldbach conjecture is false.
  • Σ(744) If you can compute this function the Riemann hypothesis is false.

Sources:

310

You're viewing a single thread.

310 comments

  • This is a common one, but the cardinality of infinite sets. Some infinities are larger than others.

    The natural numbers are countably infinite, and any set that has a one-to-one mapping to the natural numbers is also countably infinite. So that means the set of all even natural numbers is the same size as the natural numbers, because we can map 0 > 0, 1 > 2, 2 > 4, 3 > 6, etc.

    But that suggests we can also map a set that seems larger than the natural numbers to the natural numbers, such as the integers: 0 → 0, 1 → 1, 2 → –1, 3 → 2, 4 → –2, etc. In fact, we can even map pairs of integers to natural numbers, and because rational numbers can be represented in terms of pairs of numbers, their cardinality is that of the natural numbers. Even though the cardinality of the rationals is identical to that of the integers, the rationals are still dense, which means that between any two rational numbers we can find another one. The integers do not have this property.

    But if we try to do this with real numbers, even a limited subset such as the real numbers between 0 and 1, it is impossible to perform this mapping. If you attempted to enumerate all of the real numbers between 0 and 1 as infinitely long decimals, you could always construct a number that was not present in the original enumeration by going through each element in order and appending a digit that did not match a decimal digit in the referenced element. This is Cantor's diagonal argument, which implies that the cardinality of the real numbers is strictly greater than that of the rationals.

    The best part of this is that it is possible to construct a set that has the same cardinality as the real numbers but is not dense, such as the Cantor set.

    • The best part of this is that it is possible to construct a set that has the same cardinality as the real numbers but is not dense, such as the Cantor set.

      Well that's not as hard as it sounds, [0,1] isn't dense in the reals either. It is however dense with respect to itself, in the sense that the closure of [0,1] in the reals is [0,1]. The Cantor set has the special property of being nowhere dense, which is to say that it contains no intervals (taking for granted that it is closed). It's like a bunch of disjointed, sparse dots that has no length or substance, yet there are uncountably many points.

    • Yes, all of this is super cool! My favorite part, though, is the continuum hypothesis! A question that went unsolved for a long time is whether or not there exists a set with cardinality in between that of the natural numbers and the real numbers. This problem was eventually solved, and the answer is extremely interesting! The answer is not that the hypothesis is true or false, but that the hypothesis is independent from our currently accepted axioms of math. So, we could have a perfectly valid version of math where the hypothesis is true, as well as a perfectly valid version where it's false. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for set theory, and there is still active research being done on the consequences that different axioms have on the relative sizes of uncountable cardinals that are less than or equal to the size of the reals.

310 comments