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Does anyone remember the story about the famous mathematician at (I think) Princeton, who would always pick 3 as a random number in his examples. ("Let's pick a
by projectramo 9y ago
Does anyone remember the story about the famous mathematician at (I think) Princeton, who would always pick 3 as a random number in his examples. ("Let's pick a random number, say 3...")
And then he ended up mentoring an entire generation of mathematicians who adopted his habit.
And everyone would always "randomly" pick 3. It became a thing.
It's kind of a variant on the "let L be a group" because the joke relies entirely on the social conventions of a small group of people.
- Avshalom 9y agohttps://www.xkcd.com/221/ https://www.xkcd.com/221/
- jdmichal 9y agoAlso: http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25
- sp332 9y agoThis actually has a bit of a point behind it, because the digits of Pi http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~huberty/math5337/groupe/digits.html http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~huberty/math5337/groupe/digits.htm... feature "999999" much earlier than would be expected if the digits were uniformly distributed. So once that sequence was discovered, it took a lot more work for mathematicians to convince themselves that it is completely "random" (or "normal" in the jargon). It still hasn't been proven though! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Irrationality_and_normality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Irrationality_and_normality
- sloppycee 9y agoIs that a reference to the hilariously broken PS3 RNG? For those unaware, the PS3 was jailbroken because their RNG always returned 4.
- okket 9y agoThe self-inflicted degradation of the random number generator in the Debian OpenSSL packages were the main inspiration for this, I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generator_attack#Debian_OpenSSL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generator_attack...
- mikeash 9y agoThe comic is from 2007. The Debian vulnerability wasn't announced until 2008. I'm fairly sure this basic joke predates xkcd by quite a while. For example, here's a Dilbert comic from 2001 with a slight variation on it: http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 This Jargon File entry listing several specific "random numbers" has the same theme: http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/random-numbers.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/random-numbers.html
- okket 9y agoThanks. It came up so often during 2008 that I assumed it was inspired by this event, never bothered to check the dates.
- edmccard 9y agoXKCD 221 came out February 9th, 2007[1], so either Randall new about the bug before details were announced in May 2008, or it's just a joke about randomness not tied to any particular reference. [1] Go to https://xkcd.com/archive/ https://xkcd.com/archive/, hover over the title of a comic, and a tooltip will show the date EDIT: I see 'mikeash beat me to it.
- ot 9y agoReminds me of how 57 became the "Grothendiek prime". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/57_(number)#In_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/57_(number)#In_mathematics
- Yhippa 9y agoAlice wants to send a message to Bob. However, Eve is listening in...