Ever since that other anonymous website made a major contribution to mathematics, I feel like we should be able to do it too. I vote that we work on the Riemann Hypothesis.

  • What? Are you insane?

  • I'm not insane!

  • >>3
    maybe not? but, you know that's a really hard problem, right?....
    do you even know anything about math?

    13°
  • The g-ds never give mortals possible tasks. Otherwise, they would have done it themselves.

    19°
  • Shouldn't we opt for something simpler first? Like developing calculus without limits or infinities - and then use that for something trivial, like plotting trajectory of a planet moving under influence of a black hole? Of course, somewhere in between we'll need to develop new theory of gravity with our new, finite, calculus.

    27°
  • >like developing calculus without limits or infinities
    Why though? Calculus is the study of infinitesimal objects, whether you use limits or hyperreals or crazy manifold stuff you're going to need to contend with infinities.
    >and then use that for something trivial, like plotting trajectory of a planet moving under influence of a black hole
    if you mean just solving the classical two-body problem, then you can already do that without calculus, it's just weird and uses a lot of Copernican stuff.
    If you mean using Einstein's field equations... you'll need to re-invent a lot of stuff besides just calculus.

    It's not great to start off with making a new

    42°
  • *with making a new structural theory, those are only good when they actually are more useful for solving some problems.

    Places where anons could do a lot of good: chaos theory always seems to be in a bit of a shambles, there are huge open questions and a lot of it lacks rigor.

    43°
  • Please do! That would be awesome!
    Not sure I can help...

    53°
  • >Ever since that other anonymous website ...

    Which anonymous website?

    60°
  • >>60
    > Which anonymous website?
    I found a question on Stack Overflow about the topic of anonymous contributions to math, one of the answers pertained to a certain western anonymous forum:
    https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-helped-solve-a-25-year-old-math-puzzle/
    The tl;dr is a post was made asking about what was the least amount of episodes to watch every ordering of episodes in the first season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya as it was aired out of order intentionally.
    For the 14 episodes you'd have to watch a minimum of 93,884,313,611 episodes for all orderings.
    This was left unchecked properly until seven years later after Greg Egan proved the upper bound, which drew attention to the original lower bound post.
    The important thing is that both proofs (if you call an imageboard post a proof) apply to a series of any length.
    The lower bound was formalized in a paper written in October, 2018.

    The link to the paper mentioned in the article is broken so here is a working one:
    https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf
    (Links to the archived post on the board are in the paper)

    Here is the previously stated Stack question:
    https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/3001/are-there-any-anonymous-contributions-to-mathematics-that-had-a-great-impact

    Overall, a pretty interesting ordeal, though I'm not sure how surprised I am that anime would be the cause of advancements in mathematics given the audience it tends to draw.

    67°

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