9 ms·
> After months of working on solving the problem, Rafael González recalls, “I remember one morning I was making myself a slice of bread with Nutella, when sudde
by mykowebhn 7y ago
> After months of working on solving the problem, Rafael González recalls, “I remember one morning I was making myself a slice of bread with Nutella, when suddenly, I said out loud: Mothers! It is there!”
> He then ran to his computer and started programming the idea. When he executed the solution and saw that it worked, he says he jumped all over the place. It is unclear whether he finished eating the Nutella bread.
This is my favorite quote from the article. Soon to be the most famous slice of Nutella bread?
- zaroth 7y agoGave me shivers reading it. Beautiful example of the incredible mystery of the human mind. Poof! And the solution materialized. Of course, all the groundwork had been laid. All the neurons primed. Just incredible. And that formula. Damn.
- ttul 7y agoThat was my thought. Why is it so damn complex? You’d think the solution would be simpler.
- rozap 7y agoSometimes complicated things are complicated.
- ben_w 7y agoIt is. Some parts are repeated, the one which caught my eye was (zₐ’(rₐ)²+1)
- paulpauper 7y agothe full equation for general relativity would take many pages to print, but Einstein notation makes it much shorter looking. This was not the case here.
- doelie_ 7y agoProbably looks a lot simpler in A-normal form, with intermediates factored out.
- saalweachter 7y agoI mean, if it was simpler it wouldn't have taken 2000 years.
- michaelcampbell 7y agoI don't see the correlation here. Is every equation henceforth discovered guaranteed to be more complex than any before it? I hope not.
- runeks 7y ago> You’d think the solution would be simpler. Why would I think that?
- toomuchtodo 7y agoIsn’t that how most of us are solving complex problems? Building context and then walking away from the desk for a walk, or perhaps while we’re in the shower in the morning or at night, not focused on the problem but our brain working on it in the background until it is brought forward to our consciousness?
- avip 7y agoThere are many similar stories. Famously Tesla's recollection of himself "inventing the inductive motor" while walking in some garden in Hungary, and the discovery of the Benzene ring.
- punnerud 7y agoI often do this when I need a good solution to a problem: Work hard on it for a while, then leave it for one-two days. More often then not this give a way better end result.
- paulpauper 7y agomind-blown by that formula amazing what people think of
- mkl 7y agoIt wasn't thought of, it was calculated using a computer algebra system. Such systems are very powerful, but tend to be fairly bad at writing things nicely and simplifying, so they often produce insanely big and complicated formulas.
- fny 7y agoThat formula is just a Mathematica dump. If you read the paper, which is unfortunately paywalled, you'll see the result is the solution to a complex system of equations, which are far easier to digest than the result you see there.
- mkl 7y agoThis seems to be a version of it: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03792 https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03792
- m463 7y ago> Poof! And the solution ...snapped into focus
- hyperpallium 7y agoThis raises the perennial question of whether product placement is a legitimate source of funding for fundamental scientific research. After placing an ice-cube in my delicious glass of refreshing coca-cola brand carbonated beverage, I yelled Eureka! and jumped out of the bath. Is that really how it happened? Is it not inconsistent with the pursuit of truth?
- skilled 7y agoWhat truth?
- soganess 7y agoIt's really natural, on first mention, to refer to something using a member of the degenerate set of its most unique identifier, right? From that point on, to avoid repetition, mix in antecedents or generic names. Brands exploit this mechanic in language so that any time a, thereto unknown, good has to be addressed, that identification become advertising. It shifts from being a unique identification of an object/item/thing to a conjuring of the ethos/identity that contextualizes that good as being different from all the others (un)like it. I'm sure the dude was just having some hazelnut spread and that's how they recalls it but us, like them, are getting hacked. Now if you'll excuse me, the rey--, I mean tinfoil, is starting to get itchy, I need to switch it out.
- xtiansimon 7y ago>> It's really natural, when first mentioning it, to call something using by a member of the degenerate set of its most unique identifier, right? Huh? ‘degenerate set’ being what, the brand placement? I likes me some Semiotics, though not sure what this passage refers to. In the context of a photography site, brand mentions must be a hazard. The author has no problem name dropping an Ancient Greek, Newton, Leibniz, Huygens. Why not Nutella? Rather than increasing the cognitive gap between the auditor (us) and the subject (2000 year old problem), Nutella seems to take the shining brilliance of those luminaries down a notch and in line with the form of writing—a neutral density filter? Haha. Or maybe it’s just a laugh and some color.
- johnhenry 7y agoReminds me of that story about Archimedes. For anyone unfamiliar: supposedly, while bathing; he suddenly realized the principals of buoyancy. He then jumped out of the bath and ran down the street -- without clothes -- yelling "Eureka!" (I have found it). Not sure if this is true or just a legend, but I doubt we'll ever find out what happened to that Nutella bread either...
- tzs 7y agoProbably should include what problem Archimedes has been stuck on until his realization of the principles of buoyancy gave him a solution. The King had order a gold crown, and after receiving it suspected that the goldsmith may have replaced some of the gold with cheaper silver. The King asked Archimedes to figure out if the crown was pure gold. Archimedes could do that by figuring out its density, but to do that he needed to get the weight of the crown and the volume of the crown. Weight was easy, but he had no idea how to get the volume, other than melting it down and reshaping it into a shape whose volume he could calculate. Naturally, the King wanted Archimedes to answer the question without destroying the crown. His realization that the volume of water displaced by an object that is more dense than water is equal to the volume of the object gave him a way to get the volume of the crown without harming it.
- techslave 7y agoand the crown? or is the crown akin to the Nutella bread.
- jpablo 7y ago¡Madres!
- kodachi 7y agoI wonder that programming language he used. Many ideas are lost because we don't have something to write it on. That's the good thing about the so-called 'scripting languages' that IMO reduce the latency between idea and its materialization.
- justinclift 7y agoIf you're really curious, maybe ask? Shouldn't be too hard to figure out appropriate contact details. :)
- Tossrock 7y agoIt was Mathematica, they provide the code in the paper.
- csomar 7y agoBrain was doing the computing so that he can eat more Nutella bread. Bummer, he just left the Nutella bread and went programming the solution. Maybe it should have convinced him to procrastinate instead. Now, I know where all my inefficiency is coming from.
- ape4 7y agoThe article says Nutella bread, but I wonder if it was toast. Which I prefer. And the time waiting for the toast allowed long enough for his mind to wonder to the solution.
- rofo1 7y agoBrouwer had similar inspiration from a cup of coffee. In his case, the intuition was that if you stir coffee, there's a "part" of it that stays fixed. In math terms, f:X->X where X is compact and convex, and f is continuous, has a fixed point (exists x_0 in X, f(x_0)=x_0)
- the_seraphim 7y agonewton had his apple, but Gonzalez had his nutella
- ASalazarMX 7y ago> Mothers! It is there! Since no one has clearly pointed it out, "¡Madres!" is a multipurpose Mexican expression that rarely has to do with actual motherhood. "Holy crap!" is a good analogy in this case. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=madre https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=madre https://www.spanishdict.com/translate/madre https://www.spanishdict.com/translate/madre