4 ms·
"Jewish Mathematics"?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 7thaccount 2y agoI mostly just ignored the problem statement and did 7.25 - 0.75 = 7 - 0.5 = 6.5, then reread the problem and rewrote 6.5 as 6 1/2. It was sad to read the history here of antisemitism.
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago7 1/4 - 3/4 How I did it 3/4 - 1/4 = 2/4 = 1/2 = .5 7 - .5 = 6.5 = 6 1/2
- spxneo 2y agothe only "jewish math" you need to know that is useful is gematria
- gumby 2y agoUseful I don't know (for some people, I suppose) but a great answer.
- jacob019 2y agoJews have a rich tradition of finding deep meaning and significance in numbers, which goes far beyond gematria. The Torah is filled with intriguing examples, such as the seven days of creation, the 12 tribes of Israel, and the 40 days and nights of the Great Flood. Many Jewish rituals also incorporate symbolic numbers, like the 18 blessings in the Amidah prayer or the custom of giving monetary gifts in multiples of 18 (representing "chai" or life). From the cycles of the Jewish calendar to the 613 mitzvot, numbers permeate Jewish thought as a way to understand both the divine order and our human place within it.
- ghthor 2y agoThe Torah itself might be a universal constant, such as PI, a hypothesis presented by Stan Tenan in this lecture from 1989. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OJGW2UANWRE&list=PLgCDgIRQwOvKDVvy8Ngl9LbKjwHAeKF9n&index=1&pp=iAQB https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OJGW2UANWRE&list=PLgCDgIRQwOvK...
- wddkcs 2y agoThat's fascinating, especially considering Old testament beliefs regarding the Transcendence of the Torah.
- sigseg1v 2y agoI did it like this: 7 1/4 - 3/4 = 7.25 - 0.75 = 6.5 = 6 and 1/2 I would have assumed that most people would do it this way when they see a fraction that can be expressed as an easy floating point but maybe not!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 7thaccount 2y agoHaha. I posted roughly the same thing as well. I wonder if those of us in fields like engineering that are used to ugly decimal numbers have a tendency to this direction.
- alberth 2y agoMe too. And it’s not one of the two ways the article claims people do math.
- vcg3rd 2y agoI just subtracted 1 and added a 1/4, barely giving it any thought. The example given is too simple for comparing methods.
- jacob019 2y agoThis is a very hacker news discussion, discussing the math at the beginning which is entirely tangent to the point of the article. While I am deeply disturbed by the rising antisemitism in America, that's one reason why I love spending time here at hacker news, where we can forget about that and focus on technology and progress, where knowledge is the only true source of authority.
- shutupnerd0000 2y agoFixating on basic arithmetic in the intro and discarding the entire essay is considered a very hacker news discussion?
- jacob019 2y agoYeah. Let's be honest, how many articles have you replied to without reading in full? And we love math around here.
- mudhad 2y agoIf you are referring to the protests against israeli politics, that is not antisemitism. Or are you referring to something else?
- gumby 2y agoIf you strip the context from this interesting article, you are also left with an interesting point. That is: there is value in different perspectives and approaches to a problem, yet the more different the perspective the harder it is to explain to others. QM had to move forward as a slow-rolling wave for this reason (probably I thought of this case due to the horrifying example chosen by the author), while special and general relativity did not require that (instead GM was simply extremely hard to understand :-). But the example I find most interesting is Newton introducing* calculus to England in order to address bugs in celestial mechanics and prove that the orbits were elliptical.
- hagbard_c 2y ago7¼ - ¾ == (7¼ + ¼) - (¾ + ¼) == 7½ - 1 = 6½
- hanslub42 2y agoThere also was a "German Physics" movement that tried to discredit relativity theory and quantum mechanics as essentially Jewish. Heisenberg was called a "white Jew" in a SS periodical. The movement didn't have much success, and Heisenberg eventually became the leader of the (unsuccessful) German effort to develop an atomic bomb.
- eesmith 2y agoI'm pretty sure he was not. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg : > When the German scientists heard about the Hiroshima bomb, Heisenberg admitted that he had never calculated the critical mass of an atomic bomb before. When he subsequently attempted to calculate the mass, he made serious calculation errors. Edward Teller and Hans Bethe saw the transcript, and drew the conclusion that Heisenberg had done it for the first time as he made similar errors as they had. Only a week later Heisenberg gave an impressive lecture about the physics of the bomb. He correctly recognized many essential aspects, including the efficiency of the bomb, although he still underestimated it. For Popp, this is proof that Heisenberg did not spend time on a nuclear weapon during the war; on the contrary, he avoided even thinking about it. ... > The Farm Hall transcripts reveal that Heisenberg, along with other physicists interned at Farm Hall including Otto Hahn and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, were glad the Allies had won World War II.[114] Heisenberg told other scientists that he had never contemplated a bomb, only an atomic pile to produce energy. ... On the failure of the German nuclear weapons program to build an atomic bomb, Heisenberg remarked, "We wouldn't have had the moral courage to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for building the thing up."[117]
- hanslub42 2y agoIn 1942, Heisenberg became the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Theoretical Phiysics, where research into nuclear physics was conducted (on a small scale) and a Uranmaschine (small experimental reactor) was built. At that point, Heisenberg indeed didn't believe anymore in the possibility of building a fission bomb. But a year before that, Heisenberg had told Niels Bohr that he believed that such a weapon was possible. So, you're right: although there was an "atomic weapons program" in Germany, it became an "atomic energy program" quite early on, and that happened before Heisenberg became a leading figure in it. The Allies came to know this only after 1945.
- amriksohata 2y agoGreat article, many other cultures have versions of maths that are sometimes never taught, similar like vedic mathematics
- MichaelRazum 2y agois it not similar to what happens in the US? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cTokizGa6zQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cTokizGa6zQ