3 ms·
Mathematicians care about interesting ideas, not whether their theorems are true :-)
by gowld 6mo ago
Mathematicians care about interesting ideas, not whether their theorems are true :-)
- groundzeros2015 6mo agoThey care about if it’s true. But the role of the formal proof is a kind of spell checker or static analysis after they have the idea.
- j16sdiz 6mo ago> They care about if it’s true. Not always. If it is NOT true, they sometimes simply play "what if" and construct a new system where it could be true.
- BigTTYGothGF 6mo ago> If it is NOT true, they sometimes simply play "what if" and construct a new system where it could be true. I trust you have some examples of this?
- sincerely 6mo agoI think they're talking about conjectures that are unproven but seem "likely true" and people build further math off the assumption. E.G Reimann hypothesis
- ianhorn 6mo agoComplex numbers and Schwartz distributions (the thing the dirac delta is) come immediately to mind. “Not all numbers have square roots, but what if they did?” It seems like a common pattern.