Exactly, he didn’t like have computers and plumbing, so like how did he like figure that out?
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Replying to @realOmarSheriff @SteveMundie and
Her argument is phrased badly but it's at least one layer more sophisticated than you're giving her credit for She's not saying Pythagoras is STUPID, the argument isn't "HOW did you come up with it", it's "WHY" "WHY did you invent these concepts that had no practical use"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SteveMundie and
"What did you need it for?" is, in fact, a good question The people dunking on her for it are betraying their own ignorance -- most of the stuff people like Pythagoras did WASN'T that immediately applicable to practical applications, much of it was treated as esoteric
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SteveMundie and
Pythagoras came from a culture of architects and engineers but he himself was not one, nor did the Pythagoreans induce some kind of sudden revolution in architecture and engineering Mathematics was *related* to the practical arts but it was its own thing
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SteveMundie and
And that's a great degree true through all of history -- mathematicians are always messing around with concepts simply because they're interesting Pythagoras would call it "sacred" while today someone might just say "elegant" But the applications don't drive the work
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SteveMundie and
Boolean logic, for instance, is very important NOW, it's foundational to computer science and the whole world of software engineering But it certainly wasn't when George Boole was alive in the 19th century So why'd he spend so much time on it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SteveMundie and
(It's not necessarily so different from Pythagoras -- his academic work appears to have been strongly motivated by his "side interest" in theology and mysticism, despite proclaiming himself an agnostic deist He had some kind of religious vision of "Spinoza's God" as a teenager)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SteveMundie and
Her whole thing saying "Math isn't real" is a trollish way to say it but, I mean, she's right -- it's an abstract construct that isn't directly related to the physical world until you specifically use it in that way The argument for its "reality" is quasi-religious
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SteveMundie and
(And yes, I know that she clearly doesn't actually know who Pythagoras was or know anything about ancient Greece and she's confusing geometry for algebra, which was formalized and named after a book written in Baghdad over 1,000 years later But that's not the point)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SteveMundie and
I think she's also struggling with the aims of science vs engineering. "Practical use" in the sense of "can we get plumbing first" is itself an ancient argument that we still have in academia to this day. Even I troll mathematicians about number theory and how pointless it is.
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The joke about how number theorists used to revel in being the most useless branch of mathematics, until digital encryption suddenly made prime factorization an incredibly important and valuable field of study
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BrentonPoke and
Which made them very angry and set them all to dedicating themselves to find a way to solve prime factorization in polynomial time, thus destroying digital encryption and making themselves comfortably useless again (While also collapsing the world economy etc)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SteveMundie and
I will never understand number theorists
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