Conversation

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
people seem to ask this question a lot and honestly i’ve never really understood it. when you play tic-tac-toe you learn that perfect play is a draw. that’s a mathematical fact you can prove. does it “come from” somewhere? i dunno! what does that mean?
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pendertif
@pendertif
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan
Where does math come from anyway? The harmonic series is to music notation as ???? math
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
if someone thinks they understand what the question is asking i’d really genuinely appreciate it, iirc it crops up all the time, alongside “is math discovered or invented” (short answer: people invent rules to games and then discover good and bad strategies for those games)
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Lucy Keer 🪣
@drossbucket
To me it seems to have to do with the autonomy of mathematical structures... like you define something innocuous like the group axioms and suddenly there's all these extraordinarily complicated and intricate examples of them that you weren't expecting
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Lucy Keer 🪣
@drossbucket
like if you woke up and found your house was full of weird animals, you'd ask 'where did these come from?' because it definitely wasn't you who put them there
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