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Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics

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Re: Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics

#81
post #48

I didn’t see this one listed, and thought it was pretty cool when I studied it in a course a few years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skolem's_paradox “ Skolem's paradox is that every countable axiomatisation of set theory in first-order logic, if it is consistent, has a model that is countable. This appears contradictory because it is possible to prove, from those same axioms, a sentence that intuitively says…

Just to make this more concrete:

1. There is a countable model of real numbers.

2. There even is a countable model of the entire set theory.

Re: Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics

#82

For some reason, the one I have the most trouble intuitively grasping is "Two 12 Inch Pizzas have less Pizza than one 18 inch pizza."

The area enclosed by a circle is πr^2 while 12 and 18 are the diameters, right? The radius of a disc is half the diameter, so 6 and 9, respectively. 2π6^2 < 1π9^2 ~~ 226.2 < 254.5. In other words the area is proportional to the square of the radius, not linearly proportional to the diameter in any way.

> In other words the area is proportional to the square of the radius, not linearly proportional to the diameter in any way.

Awesome, thanks for that geometry refresher, that makes sense now of course :).

Re: Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics

#83
post #10

Great list! > 33. "...if you flip fair coins to generate n-dimensional vectors (heads => 1, tails => -1) then the probability they're linearly independent is at least 1-(1/2 + o(n))^n. I.e., they're very very likely independent! Counterintuitive facts about high dimensional geometry could get their own list. A side-1 cube in n dimensions has volume 1 of course, but a diameter-1 sphere inside it has volume approaching…

Only sort of true. It doesn't make sense to compare n dimensional volume to n+1 dimensional volumes, so the limit of the volume of an n-sphere isn't meaningful. The limit that does make sense is the ratio of volumes of n-sphere to an n-cube. That that goes to zero is maybe not so surprising.

In particular, it's equally valid and frankly nicer to define the unit n-sphere to be volume 1 rather than the unit cube. Do that and we see that this statement is just saying that the n-cube grows in volume to infinity, which makes sense given the fact you point out that it contains points increasingly far from the origin.

I have a hobby of turning surprising facts about the n-sphere into less surprising facts about the n-cube. So far I haven't met one that can't be 'fixed' by this strategy.

Re: Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics

#84

> 16. If you let a 100g strawberry that is 99% water by mass dehydrate such that the water now accounts for 98% of the total mass then its new mass is 50g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox I really like this one. It's a perfect combo of intuitive from one perspective and mind bending from another. > 18. A one-in-billion event will happen 8 times a month: https://gwern.net/Littlewood This one, on the other…

> > 16. If you let a 100g strawberry that is 99% water by mass dehydrate such that the water now accounts for 98% of the total mass then its new mass is 50g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox >I really like this one. It's a perfect combo of intuitive from one perspective and mind bending from another. Comes up a lot lately because of vaccine effectiveness e.g. 95% is twice as effective as 90%.

and sunscreen (SPF) calculations...

Re: Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics

#85

Considering spacetime, matter, and energy are all quantized, why is something like Gabriel's Horn significant? I don't see how it has any more relation to reality than phrases like "negative surface area" would. Also, it's patently absurd someone would include Fitch's Paradox, a piece of philosophy, on a list of "counterintuitive facts."

Gabriel's Horn was cool till someone pointed out to me that you can have a line of infinite length within a square (trivially).

When comparing something of a certain dimension with something of a higher dimension, it's not at all surprising that the lower one can be infinite and the higher one finite.

Usually it's phrased as "a finite amount of paint can paint an infinite area." But why do I need the Horn to realize this? It works in the Horn only if there is no lower limit to the thickness of paint. If you accept that, then I can take a drop and paint an infinite plane with it. Why do I need the Horn to demonstrate this?

Re: Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics

#88

> 16. If you let a 100g strawberry that is 99% water by mass dehydrate such that the water now accounts for 98% of the total mass then its new mass is 50g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox I really like this one. It's a perfect combo of intuitive from one perspective and mind bending from another. > 18. A one-in-billion event will happen 8 times a month: https://gwern.net/Littlewood This one, on the other…

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox The Wikipedia link above says: > Fred brings home 100 kg of potatoes, which (being purely mathematical potatoes) consist of 99% water. He then leaves them outside overnight so that they consist of 98% water. What is their new weight? The surprising answer is 50 kg. It annoys me when mass is used interchangeably with force (weight), so I went to the Wikipedia source, and…

The difference between weight and mass is domain specific to physics.

I actually get annoyed at people who are pedantic about these things. Precision is important in some conversations, but just elitist in other.

Anyway, the term “weight” to refer to mass outdates its use as a force - its only since Newton that we distinguish the two, after all.

Re: Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics

#89
post #15

a couple more: - at any time while stirring a cup of coffee, there will be a point on the top that is right where it started. (if we pretend coffee stirring is 2-dimensional, Brouwer's Fixed Point theorem) - a drunk man will eventually make it home, unless he can fly. in which case he only has a 34% chance. (if we assume the man is walking/flying on a grid, Pólya's recurrence theorem)

Huh, I wonder if there's any relationship to the Hairy Ball theorem. They appear to describe similar situations, but on different dimensions.

There's at least the following relationship: both the Brouwer fixed-point theorem and the hairy ball theorem are easy consequences of a more-highbrow thing called the Lefschetz fixed-point theorem.

Unfortunately even the statement of the Lefschetz fixed-point theorem is a bit complicated, but let's see what I can do. I'll have to miss out most of the details. Depending on how much mathematics you know, it may not make much sense. But here goes.

If you have a topological space X, there are a bunch of things called its "homology groups": H_0(X), H_1(X), H_2(X), and so on. I will not try to define them here. If you have a continuous map f from the space X to the space Y, then it gives rise to corresponding maps from H_k(X) to H_k(Y).

The machinery that manufactures homology groups can be parameterized in a certain way so that you can get, instead of the ordinary homology groups, "the homology groups over the rational numbers", "... over the real numbers", and so on. (These can actually be obtained fairly straightforwardly from the ordinary homology groups "over the integers".) If you do it "over the rational numbers" or "over the real numbers" then the resulting things are actually _vector spaces_, and if your space is reasonably nice they're _finite-dimensional vector spaces_.

(What's a vector space? Well, there's a formal definition which is great if you're a mathematician. If not: let n be a positive integer; consider lists of n numbers; for any given n, all these lists collectively form a "vector space of dimension n". You can do things like adding two lists (element by element) or scaling the values in a list by any number (just multiply them all by the number). A finite-dimensional vector space is a thing where you can do those operations, that behaves exactly like the lists of n numbers, for some choice of n.)

And then the maps between these vector spaces, that arise (magically; I haven't told you how) out of continuous functions between topological spaces, are linear maps. You can represent them by matrices, with composition of maps (do this, then do that) turning into multiplication of matrices.

OK. Now I can kinda-sorta state the Lefschetz fixed-point theorem.

Suppose X is a compact topological space, and f is a continuous mapping from X to itself. Then you get corresponding maps from H_k(X) to itself, for each k. For each of these maps, look at the corresponding matrix, and compute its trace: the sum of its diagonal elements. Call this t_k. And now compute t_0 - t_1 + t_2 - t_3 + ... . (It turns out that only finitely many of these terms can be nonzero, so the sum does make sense.) Then: If this is not zero, then f must have a fixed point.

So, whatever does this have to do with the Brouwer fixed-point theorem or the hairy ball theorem?

The Brouwer fixed-point theorem is about maps from the n-dimensional ball to itself. It turns out that all the homology groups of the n-dimensional ball are trivial (have only one element) apart from H_0, and that whatever f is the map from H_0 to itself that arises from f is the identity. And this turns out to mean that the alternating sum above is 1 - 0 + 0 - 0 + ... = 1. Which is not zero. So the map has a fixed point.

The hairy ball theorem says that a continuous vector field on the 2-dimensional sphere has to be zero somewhere. Suppose you have a counterexample to this. Then you can make a whole family of maps from the 2-dimensional sphere to itself, each of which looks like "start at x and move a distance epsilon in the direction of the vector at x". If epsilon=0 then this is the identity map. If epsilon is positive and sufficiently small, then the fact that the vector field is never 0 guarantees that the map does actually move every point; in other words, that it has no fixed points.

But all the terms in that infinite sum that appears in the Lefschetz fixed-point theorem are (so to speak) continuous functions of f. And it's not hard to show that the value of the sum for f = identity is exactly 2. So for very small epsilon, the value of the sum must be close to 2, and in particular must be nonzero. So, for small enough epsilon, we have a map with no fixed points and a nonzero value of the sum, which is exactly what Lefschetz says can't happen.

Re: Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics

#90
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox The Wikipedia link above says: > Fred brings home 100 kg of potatoes, which (being purely mathematical potatoes) consist of 99% water. He then leaves them outside overnight so that they consist of 98% water. What is their new weight? The surprising answer is 50 kg. It annoys me when mass is used interchangeably with force (weight), so I went to the Wikipedia source, and…

I really don’t like that example because it makes no sense. In no logical circumstance could the potatoes dehydrate so quickly when left out over a single night.

Honest question to know how others think.

It doesn't really matter, does it? The rate of evaporation is irrelevant to the problem. Mr. Potato could have waited a year, or dried them on the Uyuni salt plains.

Why do you care? Would this distraction affect your ability to solve the problem?

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