this equation is NOT cute. numbers actually hate being under a square root symbol and it distresses them
girl math this. girl math that. put some RESPECT on their names
(pictured: Emmy Noether; Sof'ja Vasil'evna Kovalevskaja; Katherine Johnson; Maryam Mirzakhani)
Here's the link to the video
👏 SAY 👏 IT 👏 LOUDER 👏
In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers—creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm.
Today’s numerical world is dominated by the Hindu-Arabic decimal system. This system, adopted by almost every society, is what many people think of as “numbers”—values expressed in a written form using the digits 0 through 9. But meaningful alternatives exist, and they are as varied as the cultures they belong to.
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Michael Collins
My favorite example of girl math is when David Hilbert and Albert Einstein couldn't solve how energy conservation worked in general relativity, so Hilbert asked Emmy Noether about it and she solved it for them.
It's so funny to me that people think of Math/Mathematicians as being hyper-logical and rational. Like, have you seen some of the wild things hiding in the Math?
Did you know there are non-computable numbers?? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant)
Did you know that there are things that are true, but we can't prove them??? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)
Did you know that we can prove that something exists, and yet never actually figure out what that thing is?? (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/NonconstructiveProof.html)
Math is crazy. Math is wild. Math hardly makes sense, and when you think you understand the weirdest parts of it, everyone who hears you explain it to thinks you're a gibbering lunatic.
"In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them." - von Neumann
(please share more unhinged math with me, i want to see more scary math)
The thing about the philosophy of mathematics is that there's no articulable position so absurd that some influential mathematician hasn't genuinely held to it. You 100% cannot troll these people; you could walk up to a mathematician and say "I'm a radical finitist, I reject the existence of all numbers larger than 1", and not only would that turn out to be a real thing, some maniac has worked out how to construct set theory under its constraints.
Maths professors be like " Oh no class we have only three minutes left but it's okay it's fine we can just prove a tiny little theorem" and then proceeds to prove the longest most abhorrent and repugnant theorem ever know to mankind.