>no Veeky Forums humor/ylyl thread
No Veeky Forums humor/ylyl thread
Bentley Hughes
Robert Cooper
LOL
David Howard
...
Mason Ross
Ok, mathfags, excuse my brainlet question, but how the fuck can 1+2+3+4.... not equal 1+1+1+1....? Any number is a sum of some number of 1s, so it's just the same thing rearranged a bit, no?
How is the -1/12 thing derived?
Elijah Roberts
youtube.com
This is simplified but they link to a more hardened proof. Note that it doesn't actually "equal" -1/12 because it doesn't converge, but it is intimately related to -1/12.
Ryan Wood
...
Xavier Watson
The Riemann zeta function is defined for real part of s bigger than one: 1 + 1/2^s + 1/3^s + ...
You can show it extends to a function for all complex s, although the formula 1 + 1/2^s + 1/3^s + ... doesn't give you the function anymore when s is arbitrary. It happens that when you plug in s = -1, you get -1/12. That's all there is to it.
Liam Torres
Even though the Reimann Zeta Function comes out to -1/12 would it still apply in the real world?
Wouldn't they both kill the same amount of people in the real world?
Ethan Long
So it's all based on stating that 1-1+1-1... can be evaluated as 1/2? What you've done is made the operation no longer strictly equivalent to addition, don't you think?
Andrew Thompson
Infinite sums don't represent anything that can come out in the real world by definition, since there is not an infinite number of anything in the real world. It appears to be mathematicians playing with definitions more than anything else.