rideside.net

Posted by dawnbixtler on 2005-01-24 18:30:21 +0000

If there's a Karl Gauss fagen next week, I may have to become a devout viewer, 'cause yeah, it'll be canceled in two weeks....

Posted by frame609 on 2005-01-24 20:23:58 +0000

You guys were completely sober, right?

Posted by bizquig3000 on 2005-01-24 22:25:47 +0000

Completely not.

Posted by dawnbixtler on 2005-01-25 01:07:10 +0000

The Village Voice chimes in on NUMB3RS... "one of the more promising debuts this month."

Do I smell another "Parker Lewis Can't Lose?"

Posted by Honar the librarian on 2005-01-25 19:17:35 +0000

Yeah, so when are we gonna watch it? If you come over before hand we can play with some non-euclidian geometry proofs, a little gauss, a little minkowski, maybe some descartes, just to prove he wasn't a totally dweeb, and to help us transition into numbers...this might enhance our appreciation of the very rectilinear plot developments of numb3rs numb3rs numb3rs...

Although I guess other stuff helps with that too.

Posted by Black Squirrel on 2005-01-25 19:21:44 +0000

I too saw the show, but why is it no one has mentioned the Andrew Wyles reference yet?

Posted by dawnbixtler on 2005-01-25 20:08:35 +0000

Because FLT (Fermat's Last Theorem) is too nerdy to begin with. Only about seventy people in the world even remotely comprehend eliptic curves, and no one knows why (still a conjecture) they map.

Posted by tendiamonds on 2005-01-25 22:35:07 +0000

That's not true, Wiles proved the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture which is how he proved Fermat's Last Theorem. I have the Nova special on the matter, and it's suprisingly good. Feel free to come to Littleton any time you care to watch it.

Posted by dawnbixtler on 2005-01-25 23:51:21 +0000

"The existence of a proof of the full Taniyama-Shimura conjecture was announced at a conference by Kenneth Ribet on June, 21 1999 (Knapp 1999)"

So the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture isn't a conjecture anymore; it's a theorem... Mmm. I dropped out of the Math scene in like '97, and it shows.

Posted by tgl on 2005-01-26 04:18:55 +0000

J.A.T. --> Just Another Theory. So, you can't tell me it's _true_, let's stick it in the corner with evolution, that other half-baked idea.

Posted by frame609 on 2005-01-26 04:25:18 +0000

Seriously. Dinosaur bones were put here by God to test our faith. Evolution is a bunch of hooey.

Posted by Honar the librarian on 2005-01-26 17:30:14 +0000

So is Wolfram math *evil* math?

Posted by tendiamonds on 2005-01-26 19:00:06 +0000

Wolfram is an arrogant asshole, and his company is one of my company's competitors. However, their online encyclopedia of things mathematic is actually rather good... damn.

Posted by Honar the librarian on 2005-03-02 19:48:36 +0000

I figured, what the hey, why not return to the thread itself...

So I as I was lying in bed last night, after playing minesweeper for like an hour, I started thinking about mathematics, and then I started to think about numbers, and how math is not synonomous with numbers, and numbers are really only a subset of mathematics, and I started to really worry that maybe numb3rs was actually doing math a disservice by focusing overly much on our post-cartesian numbers fixation. Clearly, there needs to be an episode where all of the math is abstract. Maybe centering on the pure formal aspect of the pythagorean theorem?

Then I started thinking that maybe I should get up and grab a clonipen, but that's another story.

Posted by tgl on 2005-03-02 20:12:56 +0000

I'm envisioning a remake of "Reqieum for a Dream" starring H. Moods, her TiVo, and a stack of reference books.