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There's a difference between being able to memorize what a square root is and being able to do math - which to mathematicians means being able to organize a pro
by llm_trw 2y ago
There's a difference between being able to memorize what a square root is and being able to do math - which to mathematicians means being able to organize a proof.
I've found that the people who most believe in math being a genetic ability are the ones who do not work in the symbolic world of modern math, but in the semantic world of whatever the field the math describes is.
The two are rather different.
- tgv 2y agoStrangely enough, you'd be hard pressed to find a mathematician who doesn't know what a square root is. And I didn't mention genetics. Nature is complicated.
- llm_trw 2y agoYou'd also be hard pressed to find one who doesn't know how to flush a toilet. Neither trivia has anything to do with being good at mathematics as done by mathematicians.
- tgv 2y agoAre you an LLM? You brought up the point of mathematicians not knowing what a square root is yourself. Anyway, the square root is is so many levels below maths as done by mathematicians, it's laughable.
- wholinator2 2y agoIt certainly is suspicious that their name starts, "llm"
- blharr 2y agoPretty sure you followed the thread wrong. They only mentioned the square root in response to you?
- Tainnor 2y agoSquare roots are not some "mathematical trivia", they're amongst the most fundamental operations in mathematics.
- llm_trw 2y agoIn arithmetic. There is a lot more to math than arithmetic.
- Tainnor 2y agoSquare roots are fundamental to (real and complex) analysis and to algebra (in the study of polynomials), so the two major branches of modern mathematics.
- anticensor 2y agoAlso fundamental to geometry (pythagorean equation and others).
- llm_trw 2y agoThey are fundamental to the arithmetic used in analysis and algebra. One can get along quite well without them once you replace the arithmetic expressions with more general objects.
- Tainnor 2y agoJust come on. The square root of 2 is the easiest example of an irrational number, this has been known since Ancient Greece. You can't compute distances in Euclidean spaces without the square root. "Solving equations by roots" is the bread and butter of algebra. Adjoining roots to a field is how you get Galois Theory. Several algorithms related to number theory have complexity O(sqrt(n)). And so on. You chose an extremely poor example and now you're trying to die on that hill. Please don't die on that hill.