Editing Talk:263: Certainty

Jump to: navigation, search
Ambox notice.png Please sign your posts with ~~~~

Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.

The edit can be undone. Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
Latest revision Your text
Line 4: Line 4:
 
It's easy to politicize that. Abelians versus non-Abelians ;) Not all vector spaces will likely share the property seen there.[[Special:Contributions/67.204.136.58|67.204.136.58]] 23:34, 15 August 2013 (UTC)
 
It's easy to politicize that. Abelians versus non-Abelians ;) Not all vector spaces will likely share the property seen there.[[Special:Contributions/67.204.136.58|67.204.136.58]] 23:34, 15 August 2013 (UTC)
  
If you flip ab + ac around, you end up with ac + ab which looks a lot like ACAB and that can get political very fast.{{unsigned ip|94.76.233.42}}
+
If you flip ab + ac around, you end up with ac + ab which looks a lot like ACAB and that can get political very fast.
 
 
Abelian means that ab = ba, but this distributive law is different.  Both the distributive property and the Abelian property are assumed properties of numbers, i.e., accepted as true and used to prove more complicated properties.  Non-Abelian examples of objects that "look" like numbers are not too hard to construct.  One interesting example is where "a" abd "b" are rotating a book clockwise 90 degrees (a) and rotating the book forward 90 degrees (b).  Start with the book facing you for reading and first do "a", then "b", which is written "ab".  The result has the front of the book facing up.  Now do "b" first, then "a", to get "ba".  Now the binding of the book is facing up and the front of the book is facing to the right.  So, "ab" is not "ba".  The best I can think of for the distributive type of thing is for everything to make sense, except b+c is something for which multiplying by "a" is undefined.--DrMath 09:07, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
 
 
 
But what about cryptography?  A mathematical topic, and hardly apolitical nowadays.  However, I appreciate and enjoy Randall's sentiment about the purity of mathematics.  [[Special:Contributions/108.162.219.223|108.162.219.223]] 20:23, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
 
 
 
Politicize that? Easy. When you apply the same policies to a diverse group, the outcome differs from person to person. Just insert context and it can work in a wide range of situations. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.246.211|108.162.246.211]] 02:12, 14 July 2014 (UTC)
 
 
 
Ways math can be, and often is, politicized:
 
* Politicians and government bureaucrats have imposed "New Math" of various types on children forced to suffer the public school system, several times.
 
* Don't forget the famous stories of legislators wanting to change pi to be equal to 3.0 like it is in the Old Testament, parodied on Usenet and by my favorite author in ''[[Wikipedia:Stranger in a Strange Land|Stranger in a Strange Land]]''.
 
* Mathematics is one of the biggest forms of lying that advocates of central planning use. There are [[Wikipedia:lies, damned lies, and statistics|lies, damned lies, and statistics]].
 
* To expand on that last one, math is fundamentally little more than an expression of logic using a notation system as language. Many logical fallacies can be seen as mathematical fallacies. Essentially, a(b+c)=(ab)+(ac) can be complexified until it is very long and convoluted, but then tweaked so that it ceases to be true, and many will not notice the error at a glance. And this is what many verbal expressions of both formal and informal logical fallacies are essentially doing.
 
—[[User:Kazvorpal|Kazvorpal]] ([[User talk:Kazvorpal|talk]]) 14:27, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
 
 
 
The Old Testament does not declare pi equal to 3.0; that's actually a [https://www.hillsdale.edu/hillsdale-blog/from-our-faculty/history-of-pi/ common misconception] (see paragraph 3).
 

Please note that all contributions to explain xkcd may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see explain xkcd:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!

To protect the wiki against automated edit spam, we kindly ask you to solve the following CAPTCHA:

Cancel | Editing help (opens in new window)

Template used on this page: