Strings

|< < Prev Comic #5833 (November 11, 2020) Next > >|

strings

Title text: I think God permitted infinities just to permit stupid proofs.

Votey

Explanation

This explanation is either missing or incomplete.

Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts describe what happens in each panel — here are some good examples to get you started (1) (2).

[Describe panel here]

The proof of riemann's hypothesis is trivial.

I don't have the solution - that's busywork. I'm just saying the solution is trivial.

Oh.? Then write it down and claim your fields medal.

Think about the space of all possible proofs. There are infinite proofs, all of which are just strings of little squiggles. It follows

That for any given proof, there is some other proof that is both longer and has more complicated squiggles.

Since "triviality" is always a relative quality, you can make a proof trivial just by locating a harder one among the infinite options. Thus, we have shown that all proofs are trivial, including this one.

That seems non-obvious.

Actually everything is obvious.

smbc-comics.com

Votey Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts describe what happens in each panel — here are some good examples to get you started (1) (2).

[Describe panel here]

The one downside is that the answer is approximately infinity characters in length.

 add a comment! ⋅  add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅  refresh comments!

Discussion

No comments yet!