Math majors are useless

Then why don't you math majors call it something else?

We do.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan_summation

Sage the thread because it's bait, but serious reply.

You realize it took both mathematicians and scientist 300 years to understand what the fuck the imaginary unit was, why it was important, and how to use it, right?

Math and science have a very positive and mutual relationship of inspiring and sharing ideas. Often the key mathematics needed to describe a physical phenomenon are laid out years before the application is found. This has happened time and time again (for instance differential geometry and relativity, or all the group theory of the standard model). Just as often physics and engineering ask interesting questions that mathematicians can use to formulate theory and generalize.

Maybe these weird summation rules will one day be found to help with our understanding of renormalization in particle physics, or perhaps with characterizing chaotic systems.

I don't know. But I'm sure as hell am not stupid enough to bad mouth counter intuitive ideas just because I don't understand them at first. Any knowledge you can accumulate, no matter how worthless it seems, is better than knowing nothing at all. Often times the deepest and most surprising connections in mathematics and science have been when someone was dicking around with stupid shit just because and got lucky.

Last thing: the study of infinities in math has been both extremely surprising and incredibly important for theoretical and practical developments (Hilbert spaces anyone?). Any concrete result about infinities is worthy of note IMHO.

Being this BTFO

>leave Veeky Forums forever

>tfw not born 150 years in the future as a mixed race honors student taking AP IUTECH in high school.

>Math and science have a very positive and mutual relationship
Stopped reading right there. You math majors do not employ the scientific method whatsoever.

>I'm sure as hell am not stupid enough to bad mouth counter intuitive ideas just because I don't understand them at first.
I'm not trying to badmouth infinite series sums.
It's just that imaginary numbers take the same kind of heat from non-mathematicians, but there's an engineering use for them.
Something similar for -1/12 could dispel some of the criticism.
I know it would go a long way towards making me a believer.

Until then, I have to be content with the notion that I just don't know enough about the math involved to criticize it.
And that's kind of unsatisfactory.

Why would mathematicians employ the scientific method? To what fucking end?

It's literally, 100% useless.

And your reading comprehension is deplorable. Underage brainlet detected.

OK, assume you're an engineer. You need ODE's, right? In that case, you've satified the prereq's for the analysis sequence. Take analysis 1, analysis 2, real analysis, complex analysis (where you will learn to understand the -1/12 meme). You can do it in a year if you take courses in the summer.

Understanding the theory and logic behind it all will also make you a better engineer/ scientist.

You're thinking of applied math

Haha wow. Fuck off you insipid undergraduate.

>OK, assume you're an engineer.
Code monkey actually.
Went to Vo-Tech in high school (class of 1982) to be an electrician.
I really should hang out in /g/, but I like you guys better.

Nope, I've already got the degree. Gonna go ahead and guess you aren't even an undergrad in science, just an English major that comes on Veeky Forums to feel superior.

> taking 2 semesters of analysis between calculus and real analysis
umm what?

> ... math ... [does] not employ the scientific method whatsoever.

That's a topic of philosophy, not math or science.

Arguably mathematicians do indeed employ the scientific method, although few people think of them as doing scientific research because they are not studying something strictly physical. They investigate patterns and relationships, try to explain them using only the bare minimum of details, and follow the logical conclusions of their observations and assumptions to understand the structures they are studying.

This is similar to how a scientist collects data, tries to explain the data by making hypotheses, and performing experiment and simulation to see if the hypotheses were correct.

You could argue that math isn't falsifiable, it can be anything, but that's only partially true. If a math system can prove anything, it's called inconsistent, and isn't interesting. The only good math is math that is consistent, which makes statements about things whose truth can be investigated. Thus, although the rules for math can seem arbitrary, the consequences of the chosen rules aren't.

> Something similar for -1/12 could dispel some of the criticism.
The point is, although it doesn't have a clear application that we on the forum know of, that doesn't preclude the possibility of it being useful in some future theory. No guarantee, but no telling either. For now, if it doesn't interest you, feel free to acknowledge that their are consistent ways to assign values to diverging sums, and one of them happens to assign -1/12 to the sum of positive integers and leave it at that. It doesn't get in the way of learning things we know to be useful already. It just says you are probably an applications guy rather than a researcher.

Your posts imply otherwise.

It's amazing you made such a long post without saying anything.

This solution is used in string theory. It is meaningful, even in the physical world.

oh and 1/10 for getting me to reply but nice bait tho

>This solution is used in string theory. It is meaningful, even in the physical world.

elaborate

The sum of all integers evaluating to a negative fraction seems to not only be meaningless in the physical world, but also actively contradicts things that we know for certain.

> implying a math major can't go and do just about anything because of transferable skills

>When niggas talk shit about what they don't understand and it's real nigga hours and you just proved there are infinitely many modular forms that have a unique L-f attached to them

>So user, we are looking to build an elevator to the heavens, how many tons of concrete do we need?

>-1/12

Kill yourself.

Maths is based on Axioms. Higher maths has Axioms that don't always related to our physical reality, only logical problems.

Axioms can be arbitrary, considering physical reality. Such as the number two, you can't go out and hunt a number two down.

So fucking deal with it. Engineers learn a bit of maths, maths majors learn far more, despite it being nonsensical to you.

No its not. The limit of the sums of the series of the n first positive integers as you keep adding terms is -1/12.

Also what the fuck do engineers have to do with science\anything thats like saying leave science to zookeepers.

>math is bad cuz i don't get it
die

It's used in QM

People are afraid of things they don't understand.

The sum of all natural numbers equals Entropy.

ok, honey, go count your apples then

>Also what the fuck do engineers have to do with science\anything thats like saying leave science to zookeepers.
A lot. Engineers if they worth anything they have to be able to design and conduct experiments and analyze data. They also need to understand science so they can apply it. It's obviously a different viewpoint when you see things from a perspective of "what can I do with it?"

ITT: brainlets

String theory.

It's easy to confuse yourself with this shit but it's quite simple.

All that the ramanujan summation stuff, cutoff and zeta regularization does, is look at the smoothed curve at x = 0.
What sums usually do is look at the value as x->inf.

It's just a unique value you can assign to a sum, really they have many such values.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_+_2_+_3_+_4_+_⋯#/media/File:Sum1234Summary.svg