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This is a fun little piece, but worth noting: It is absolutely a work of fiction (“hoax”, as Wikipedia puts it [1]). I was fooled the first time I read it…but
by michaericalribo 5y ago
This is a fun little piece, but worth noting:
It is absolutely a work of fiction (“hoax”, as Wikipedia puts it [1]). I was fooled the first time I read it…but the date at the bottom gives it away.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen
- skullgrid 5y agoTBH this post should probably be taken down, or at least explicitly stated as an April Fools joke in the title. I almost didn't come to the comments section, and I didn't read all the way to the bottom date. I definitely would have taken this as fact.
- dvt 5y agoThis a very well known April Fools joke (especially in academia). Maybe the date should be added, but taking it down is a bit much.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoMy skeptic-radar was pinging at a rate that it sounded like a continuous tone.
- lanstin 5y agoWhile I enthusiastically retweeted it with a little nostrum on how funny people's interests are. Then read the comments, and then deleted the tweet.
- bla3 5y agoSounds like you learned a valuable lesson about believing things you read on the internet today :) Taking it down means others won't be able to learn this lesson.
- Quekid5 5y agoI agree that it's important to learn these lessons, but if recent history has taught us anything it's that reach and amplification will drown out most voices of reason. I think Vimes might have had an aphorism about this... EDIT: aphorism, not proverb
- skullgrid 5y agoSure, it is generally wise to keep your guard up when reading things on the internet (or any source). That's fair enough. But at the same time, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect HN posts to adhere to a higher standard. IMO HN is not the appropriate forum for pseudo-intellectual gotchas.
- BizarroLand 5y agoTrue, but at the same time, it is difficult to overlook the weight of Yale, the fact that this was published there, had I not found it so intriguing that I wanted to see what others were saying about it I would not have fact checked it. "A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.”—Mark Twain This is a glorious example of that.
- hoseja 5y agoI was extremely skeptical from the start, simply because it's fairly impossible to stumble on the Mandelbrot set by just messing about, it's a result of iterating a fairly arbitrary function on complex numbers and can't reasonably be generated by hand.
- orangecat 5y agoYou don't need the full theory of complex numbers. Start with a zero vector, then iterate doubling the angle, squaring the magnitude, and translating by the vector you're evaluating. It's not totally inconceivable that somebody could have come up with it by just messing around geometrically. But yes, good instincts.
- hoseja 5y agoWow, thanks! Never heard the geometric explanation and it, as usual, is way more intuitive.
- rocqua 5y agoConsider this formulation of complex numbers: Unit is 2x2 identity matrix. imaginary unit is the matrix -1 0 0 1 It is easy to check that imaginary unit squared is -1. And addition and multiplication is just matrices. It then quickly becomes apparent that all possible matrices you generate _are_ the rotation and scaling matrices. Instead of drawing a connection between rotation and complex numbers, they all of a sudden are the same thing.
- joshspankit 5y agoThe photo definitely looks photoshopped, but it’s just believable enough to warrant reading the comments
- SkyMarshal 5y agoIt definitely needs the title to be flagged. It's a time waster unless you know it's a hoax and still want to read it.
- quasarj 5y agoWell, that certainly explains why he quotes the lyrics of O Fortuna incorrectly! I was really scratching my head when I got to that part.. and then came here to see if I was crazy. Guess I wasn't!