Our Fractional Universe

September 18, 2024 5:23 PM

An esoteric branch of math called fraction theory may hold the answers to science’s deepest mysteries. You may think you know what numbers are. Chances are, you learned to count before you entered kindergarten, and number-names like “one”, “two”, and “three” were among the first words you learned...
posted by Wolfdog (23 comments total)

This was funny. I spent the first few paragraphs trying to figure out if this was for real and then saw "Gaston Matzobrei" and burst out laughing.

He avoided the students, choosing to walk through the quad along a diagonal. “Sometimes I do wonder … What if, scattered among all those infinitely many in-between numbers we know about, there are other, even crazier in-between numbers?”

I see what you did there!!
posted by potrzebie at 5:43 PM on September 18 [5 favorites]

Jim's blog is great and this may be his greatest post ever.
posted by escabeche at 6:01 PM on September 18 [3 favorites]

I also enjoyed this and I think Gaston Maztobrei is the best name in the piece.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 6:01 PM on September 18 [1 favorite]

I hate these breezy pop sci writeups. For one thing, they're always out of date. The Hamburger Enigma has been considered resolved for almost a decade. Ketchup!
posted by phooky at 6:06 PM on September 18 [3 favorites]

How do you divide an eight slice piece evenly between three mystery writers? If murder is off the table, invite a friend.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:06 PM on September 18 [3 favorites]

You may think you know what numbers are.

Numbers are big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big they are.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:51 PM on September 18 [9 favorites]

This guy thinks he’s being funny but he hasn’t taught woodworking to high schoolers like I do every day.

Fractions bend their fucking brains. I won’t even get into conversion of fractions to decimals.

🤯
posted by Big Al 8000 at 7:45 PM on September 18 [8 favorites]

After Frog Fractions I totally saw this coming!
posted by silentbicycle at 8:35 PM on September 18

This is, of course, set in an alternate universe where John Vinculum got hit by a car just before making his greatest discovery in 1953.
posted by BiggerJ at 8:39 PM on September 18

Haha, I immediately realized “this is snarky commentary about something” but couldn’t deduce the target. Fortunately Jim explained it in the comments section for integer-bound minds like mine. I GET IT NOW!
posted by ejs at 9:06 PM on September 18

This was great. Lots of deep cuts for pop physics/math discourse, simultaneously an homage and a roast. About halfway through I started expecting some kind of hammy but similarly fun setup with irrationals before the end, but the way he actually did it was much funnier than anything I could have come up with.
posted by biogeo at 9:39 PM on September 18 [3 favorites]

This guy thinks he’s being funny but he hasn’t taught woodworking to high schoolers like I do every day.

I was on a huge woodworking group on Facebook for a while. Someone posted "I'm making a 6-sided table. I want to assemble the top out of 6 triangles. What angle should I cut to make the triangles?"

There were about 80 different answers. The thread had hundreds of comments arguing and a bunch of people left the group.

I also saw at least one "Hamburger Enigma" argument in that group.

Also, every woodworker in Europe thinks the Metric system is superior (it is) but they think the reason it's superior is that they don't have to use fractions...

Gaston Maztobrei
I laughed out loud at "Sabrina Hassenpfeffer".
posted by mmoncur at 12:20 AM on September 19 [1 favorite]

Oh, I think I've heard of this before. There was an XKCD comic about it. I didn't get it but I laughed out loud anyway so my colleagues didn't think I was dumb.
posted by AlSweigart at 12:44 AM on September 19 [1 favorite]

Bah. Come back to me when you've discovered the set of cool numbers like smyeventy and bleventeen.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 4:49 AM on September 19

I admit it, my reaction was "what is this crap?" and to stop reading. I didn't realize it was a parody until I read the comments.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:58 AM on September 19

I guess the oblique references to Wolfram and Penrose are references to those who propose a new model, paradigm, way of thinking about something, that usually doesn’t pan out later. Despite the humor, or maybe, because of the humor, I learned something! Thanks!
posted by njohnson23 at 8:01 AM on September 19

“ the many philosophers who have never wielded a broom or a razor”

I was wondering where to put in a reference to classical Greek work on the rationals but decided that the Glibbs of the world aren’t the ones given to ancient-knowledge puffery. The hypotenuse closer is shweet enough.
posted by clew at 9:00 AM on September 19

The hypotenuse closer

"I'm here to pound this triangle down to a line. They call me...The Hypotenuse Closer."
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:04 AM on September 19 [2 favorites]

To fit 1/3 into the world of decimal fractions, we would need a terrifying numerical monster with infinitely many 3’s. Needless to say, such unending expressions correspond to no process in nature, and so it has been justly asked whether they have any place in a physical theory.

I tell myself I can stop any time, say when the answer is close enough or has enough detail to minimise errors in real-world use ... I tell myself this, and then a fortnight, a season, a decade has gone by and I've got a new longest entry to post to the Online Encylopedia of Fractional Approximations. I have to make do with the mantra of "this is close enough, for every level of detail, epsilon, I can find a smaller delta that's a better approximation, but that's for another day." I have to be real that My Name is K3n and I'm a Mathematician.
posted by k3ninho at 11:12 AM on September 19 [1 favorite]

I tell myself I can stop any time

They call it recreational mathematics, it sounds harmless enough. And then you realize that the sun is coming up and you've been scribbling incomprehensibly on a blackboard all night.
posted by eruonna at 1:43 PM on September 19 [5 favorites]

I can't stand this kind of woo woo quantum universe nonsense. Fractional numbers are nothing more than fodder for Deebag Chobro and all the other New Age grifters.
posted by mikeand1 at 2:21 PM on September 19 [2 favorites]

And the dude who's got, like, strings of digits as his idea of the base underlying the standard model? What's his name, Kwakoo?
posted by k3ninho at 2:24 PM on September 19 [1 favorite]

I tell myself I can stop any time

You keed, but those of us with mild OCD tendencies find it hard to resist the urge to add a few more 333333's onto the numbers when we do everyday calculations of no particularly significant consequence. You don't want to end up with some kind of 5 cent rounding error when calculating the interest on that $1,000 CD, so best to use at least 10 significant digits.
posted by mikeand1 at 2:26 PM on September 19 [2 favorites]