The Interesting Number Paradox
The Interesting Number Paradox
22 comments
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What if I think that all of the numbers are uninteresting? Does that make them all interesting? But doesn't that, in turn, make all of them uninteresting?
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c/SyndromeDidNothingWrong
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Suppose that's why it's called a paradox
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🤯
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Here's a nerdy math way.
Assume that some numbers are not interesting. Let n be the smallest non-interesting number. Since n is the smallest number that's not interesting, it is interesting.
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I don't think I can think of anything less interesting than a grade school pseudo-paradox.
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This is why this only applies to people if you have a number assigned to each person that increases by 1 for each person.
In theory such a number could exist, but it doesn't now, so I'm afraid that little girl is actually not
specialinteresting. 😉
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Vertasium on 37: https://youtu.be/d6iQrh2TK98
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1730 seems pretty uninteresting to me, and that hasn't changed after taking a few minutes to check if there's anything that makes it less than dull.
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1729 is a very interesting number.
1730... is not.
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So, I picked it by choosing 12^3 + 2. I wanted to start with something easily factored (power of 12) and not too small, but not interesting because of its factorization. And I wanted it to be even, since odd numbers tend to have funny quirks. So a simple +2.
What's amusing is that I did this before looking at the Wikipedia page. According to that, the original number that inspired this paradox was 1729. So just by happenstance, I picked one integer higher than the original "uninteresting" number. Which I guess arguably makes 1730 interesting now (though admittedly not for mathematical reasons).
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"Noteworthy" and "interesting" aren't synonyms.
Gad, you've got me doing it!
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"Remarkable." "Fascinating."
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You may think you're a Trekkie, but did you know that the first Star Trek parody show was a one season flop called "Quark?" It was about an interstellar garbage scow, and it had a crew including two clones.
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the interestingness of numbers is a field that fulfills Laplace's equation, with the constraint that 0 is infinitely interesting, and the interestingness converges to zero for n -> infinity.
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Four
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Four is bad luck in Japanese superstition, because its pronunciation ('shi') is the same as the word for 'death'.
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But if 2 numbers arent interesting, they wont become interesting from not being interesting because there are multiple of them
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It's kind of interesting that there are 2 of them.
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But neither of them are individually interesting, only together
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22 comments