Conversation

sat down to finally get my head around cantor’s diagonal argument and it is effin me up rn

Jun 27, 2020

I still remember how I felt for a full 48 hours after learning this proof. One of the most beautiful things I've ever learned 💙

Tim Hwang

@timhwang

Jun 28, 2020

🙌 i'm still riding the high it'd be fascinating to collect small oral histories from people telling their remembrances of the first time they ran into particular proofs

Replying to

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When I first understood that the halting problem was undecidable, I felt the kind of exhilarating dislocation I imagine the square in Flatland feeling. The answer (“such a program cannot exist”) wasn’t a class for me before: always “we don’t know how to X” or “X is intractable.”

9:56 PM · Jun 28, 2020Twitter Web App

Replying to

and

At first I misunderstood—that what it was really saying was that you *could* write such a program but it would take infinitely long. But when I understood what it was really saying, I just boggled.