Comments by "Peter Lund" (@peterfireflylund) on "How One Line in the Oldest Math Text Hinted at Hidden Universes" video.

  1. He said it was disregarded by everybody because it was “obviously” nonsense. Turned out, it wasn’t nonsense.
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  2. Not published nearly as much. Literacy was very important to Christians, especially after Gutenberg and Luther. It wasn’t important to the Muslims. Being able to recite the Quran in Arabic (often without understanding Arabic!) was. Priorities, you know.
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  3. I tried to find out just a few days ago. It seems she is doing better, but only slightly.
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  4. Math isn’t quite reality. It is a sort of idealized, prettified, simplified world — which turns out to be useful for approximate descriptions of reality. If you try to do geometry with lines that have width and points that take up space, you realize you are imprecise (and that your math can’t be simple). You realize that thinner lines and smaller points work better — and the ultimate version of that is lines with no width and points that take up no space. (Your elementary school teacher should have told you that. Mine didn’t and I’m still pissed about it.)
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  5.  @BentleyDeuce there isn’t much justice in accepting the Jewish Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem.
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  6. Once is enough. Twice is more than that. This is n times too many.
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  7. Why wouldn’t he? Christians in medieval Europe had no problem citing their works. They had a problem with the Muslim religion and with the constant piracy, slavery, and war from the Muslims but not with their better philosophers — who were generally heretics, anyway. Many of them spent decades in exile or house arrest… (All decent people have a huge problem with Islam because it is a central tenet of Islam that Christians must be treated badly. Precisely how depends on where in the religious texts one looks: maybe they should be killed, maybe their lands should be stolen, maybe they should be slaves of the Muslims, maybe they should just pay extra taxes for the sin of not being Muslim. If you agree with that, you are a good Muslim and an awful human being. If you disagree, you are a bad Muslims but maybe a good person. If you deny this dichotomy, you are either a liar or ignorant about Islam.)
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  8. It’s because Tom Lehrer didn’t write a song about him.
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  9. Bad choice of words on Derek’s part. He meant a new postulate that was essentially “the 5th postulate is false”. There are many ways of doing that (with many equivalent postulates), just like there are many postulates that are equivalent to the 5th postulate.
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  10. The Kerala school (India’s only real claim to math fame before Ramanujan) was a lot later than Euclid. The Greeks really were far ahead of everybody else — except for a tiny area of math about simultaneous equations where the Chinese were ahead. This is what led to linear algebra once the Europeans started thinking seriously about it. (But their head start seems to have come a few centuries after Euclid… it’s hard to say exactly what was invented/discovered when because no original manuscripts survive from China and Greece. All we know is that the Indians were far behind the Greeks in everything and that the Chinese were far behind in almost everything.)
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  11.  @FahlbeckIII because they don’t like freedom fighters.
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  12. Palestinians usually behave very badly in Europe so we don’t have much sympathy. We know the Jews stole the land, we know they are the aggressors — but Jews don’t rape and murder people in Europe and they don’t blow up random buildings in Europe or run big trucks into crowds to kill people. A pox on both your houses.
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  13.  @molybd3num823 are they equibolic?
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  14. Precisely. I hate that model because it gives people an entirely wrong idea while also giving them a fake feeling of “understanding”.
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