seeing more math on the TL recently. i haven't mathposted in a long time but i'm still happy to field math questions from twitter peeps, just reply here or tag me or w/e. big meaty philosophical questions like "wtf are real numbers anyway" would be particularly fun for me rn
Conversation
What is an important yet relatively simple proof in pure math?
Ideally something that a smart non-mathematician could dig their teeth into for 5-50 hours and learn cool stuff along the way.
1
5
hmm. after thinking about it for 20s i think it's hard to do better than the unsolvability of the halting problem. the proof is extremely short and elegant and it's one of the most important basic facts, like, ever
1
10
Replying to
even simpler but still pretty good as like a warmup is the impossibility of lossless compression
