251
votes
Accepted
Have mathematicians concluded that an Indian mathematical physicist has solved the Riemann Hypothesis?
Summary
The current version of the question asks two things:
Have mathematicians concluded that an Indian mathematical physicist has solved the Riemann Hypothesis?
No. There isn't a single ...
- 5,484
180
votes
Accepted
Did Euler make the elementary mistake √-2 √-3 = √6?
Euler did write this, but it was not a mistake! Euler's statement was correct under his own definition of the notation that he was using.
I looked at the PDF version of Elements of Algebra linked to ...
- 1,058
134
votes
Accepted
Can you predict a number that is "randomly" chosen by a person better than chance?
Yes, humans are more predictable than random chance. It is known as the "Blue-Seven Phenomena", because when asked for a colour and a number from one to nine, these perform beyond expectation.
This ...
- 145k
104
votes
Did Bertrand Russell spend 360 pages in Principia Mathematica to prove 1 + 1 = 2?
If you have only studied mathematics at school, the way it works at university/academic level can be quite alien.
By looking at the original Principia Mathematica, by Alfred Whitehead AND Bertrand ...
- 145k
100
votes
Accepted
Did Roman jurists rule that "to learn the art of geometry and to take part in public exercises, an art as damnable as mathematics, are forbidden"?
No. They used a sentence that includes "mathematica" and condemns and forbids it, but they were not using a modern definition of "mathematician", which gives the sentence a very ...
- 44.1k
90
votes
Accepted
Is Chika Ofili's method for checking divisibility for 7 a "new discovery" in math?
The Math.SE question about the method (Why does Chika Ofili's method for checking divisibility for 7 work?) is closed as a duplicate of an earlier, more generic, question (Divisibility criteria for 7,...
- 2,089
64
votes
Have mathematicians concluded that an Indian mathematical physicist has solved the Riemann Hypothesis?
Following up @DanRomik's full, accurate answer: I was one of the thousands of people asked to study and comment upon the original document. After a brief look, I realized that it was of a fairly ...
- 599
46
votes
Can you predict a number that is "randomly" chosen by a person better than chance?
Human beings are really bad at picking random numbers. The reason is that we are hard-wired to identify patterns in nature -- even to the extent of seeing patterns where none exist. But while this ...
- 885
45
votes
Did Bertrand Russell spend 360 pages in Principia Mathematica to prove 1 + 1 = 2?
Did Bertrand Russell spend 360 pages in Principia Mathematica to prove 1 + 1 = 2?
Sort of. But the phrasing of the claim (either as you stated it, or in the version "it takes over 360 pages to ...
- 5,484
42
votes
Did the precedence of operations in arithmetic change since 1917?
[I edited this answer in response to the helpful comments in the chats. Thanks to everyone for their feedback!]
0. Introduction
TLDR: No, none of the order of evaluation conventions changed since the ...
- 2,157
24
votes
Did Euler make the elementary mistake √-2 √-3 = √6?
Euler did argue that √-2 √-3 = √6. Whether this is a mistake depends a lot on context. This appears in Euler's 1770 publication Elements of Algebra in Section I., Chapter XIII. (pdf link).
...
- 421
21
votes
Did the precedence of operations in arithmetic change since 1917?
The answer to the title question is no for the simple reason that the (fuzzy, inconsistent) rules mentioned in Lennes's 1917 note are still in wide use today.
I think it's important to distinguish ...
- 3,694
19
votes
Is Chika Ofili's method for checking divisibility for 7 a "new discovery" in math?
This and related divisibility tests are ancient and well-known to most who have mastered a first course in elementary number theory. They go back at least a couple hundred years, and possibly even ...
- 465
17
votes
Accepted
Is the use of X for unknown quantities taken from the Arabic word "shay"?
Most likely no. X is one of many symbols used for unknowns throughout the history of mathematics, and comes from a notation in the 1600's that used several other letters alongside X. Some Arab ...
- 11.6k
15
votes
Accepted
Is "Magic: The Gathering" the world's most complicated game?
Magic: the Gathering is computationally complex, not "complicated"
At least it's not "complicated" in a way that's been quantified by these sources. They appear to be confusing the ...
- 731
14
votes
Accepted
Did René Descartes develop the Cartesian coordinate system by watching a fly on the ceiling?
The book Descartes: A Very Short Introduction (which at 100 pages vastly exceed most on-line biographies of him) only has this to say on the matter
Readers who are familiar with representing ...
14
votes
Accepted
Are Asian women better at maths when they think they're competing against European men?
tl;dr; There are indications for this effect, but the research is still unconclusive. The claim as stated is probably false.
The evidence
This statement refers to the widely studied Stereotype ...
- 440
12
votes
Accepted
Are there many per capitas?
Here are a few definitions of "per capita":
Wikipedia: The phrase thus means "by heads" or "for each head", i.e., per individual/person.
Merriam-Webster: per unit of population : by or for each ...
- 5,866
12
votes
Have mathematicians concluded that an Indian mathematical physicist has solved the Riemann Hypothesis?
"So, has the committee actually come to the conclusion that the Riemann Hypothesis has been solved by Kumar Eswaran?"
Yes they did: "On the basis of the assessment, this expert ...
- 1,186
10
votes
Is the difference between men and women' estimates of their number of sexual partners caused because men estimate rather than count?
There are studies that support what she is saying to some extent, but she is exaggerating.
For example in Estimating number of lifetime sexual partners: Men and women do it differently 1999 (...
- 109k
10
votes
Did Bertrand Russell spend 360 pages in Principia Mathematica to prove 1 + 1 = 2?
Why do we need to prove 1+1=2 in the first place?
I don't think anyone else has fully addressed this part of the question. Before this time there had been assumptions by many that arithmetic and ...
9
votes
Accepted
Was there a person made the quote about poetry that Poincaré responded to?
Poincaré did say the one quote:
We have just seen, through an
example, the importance of words in
mathematics, but I could cite many more cases.
It is scarcely credible, as Mach said, how ...
- 34.1k
8
votes
Can you predict a number that is "randomly" chosen by a person better than chance?
An other approach, less to answer the question about statistics, but more about how to pull of the Trick.
There are 2 Methothds that you can do this.
One is trying to figure out, what number the ...
- 253
8
votes
Do Imperial units make United States children worse at maths?
Well, international tests like this aren't useful for gauging whether metric is better for math or not due to two main issues when assessing education quality on an international scale:
Who gets ...
- 81
8
votes
Is "Magic: The Gathering" the world's most complicated game?
The authors (Churchill et al) make a rather strong claim:
Prior to this work, no undecidable real games were known to exist.
By "real game" they seem to mean a game played with the rules ...
- 3,694
6
votes
Are there more 40-moves chess games than atoms in the universe?
The accepted answer is wrong, due to the fallacy of accepting a link to a another website as the truth, rather than actually doing the math.
Particularly, the site http://mathworld.wolfram.com/...
- 109k
5
votes
Are these occurences of the mathematical constants e and pi in The Bible at all exceptional?
There are a lot of formulas that look simple.
"The absolute error is less than 0.00004" (actually that's the relative error) basically means that the first four digits match (when ignoring the ...
- 1,138
5
votes
Was Aryabhatta the first to invent place value system and zero?
You are correct in thinking that the Indians were the first to implement the zero as it is currently used, as a place value, and also as a number that you can use to add, subtract, and multiply. They ...
- 5,866
5
votes
Accepted
Does Heads Up Texas Hold'em have more possible hands than atoms in the universe?
According to Superhuman AI for heads-up no-limit poker: Libratus beats top professionals Science 26 Jan 2018:
Vol. 359, Issue 6374, pp. 418-424, Head-Up No Limit (HUNL) Texas Hold'Em
has 10^161 ...
- 109k
5
votes
Accepted
Has knowledge in mathematics in teenagers decreased through time?
Concerning the United States, the publication Reading and Mathematics Score Trends gives data for 1973-2012.
See especially figure 2.
The national trend in mathematics achievement shows
...
- 109k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible