Gotta Love Mathematicians For Never Being Able To Name Concepts Normally

this equation is NOT cute. numbers actually hate being under a square root symbol and it distresses them

Michael Collins

Problem: Maths (& Physics) have too many cases where a symbol is used, confusingly, to mean multiple different things, leading to ambiguity and headaches. Sensible solution: Use a key or just simply clarify the meaning in context, so v here is velocity, or v here is an arbitrary vector, or v here is specifically final velocity, or v here is the harmonic function for the complex part of a complex function f(z) for the purposes of the Cauchy-Riemann & Laplacian equations, or v here is the potential V(x) differentiated with respect to time (yes i have seen this once, it was disgusting). My solution: add new characters. invent new scripts. steal syllabaries, acquire abjads, and abduct alphabets until we have enough squiggly lines to give literally everything its own unique symbol. This will help nobody and ruin everything. I will not rest until I am doing theoretical physics with these bad boys:

[Image ID: The 120 base Sitelen Pona of Toki Pona. They are simple, black and white, cartoonish, almost child-like drawings that act as logographic characters for the base words of the conlang Toki Pona. Each one has its corresponding name/word in Latin script beneath. End ID] Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

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.

It's Elephants Foot Friday!!!!

RB to instantly receive 8000 roentgens of radiation

Here's the link to the video

👏 SAY 👏 IT 👏 LOUDER 👏

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.

My latest cartoon for New Scientist