sat down to finally get my head around cantor’s diagonal argument and it is effin me up rn
Conversation
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 💙
3
1
18
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.”
1
3
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.