Math Memes

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Memes related to mathematics.

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1: Memes must be related to mathematics in some way.
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I'd do it out of scientific curiosity. (feddit.org)

submitted 3 months ago by mech@feddit.org to c/mathmemes@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It will always reduce to a cycle of 4→2→1→4→2→1, so you won't end up with a huge number.

But yeah, it would take infinite time to reach infinite loops, and meanwhile people can get on and off, so in reality nobody dies prematurely...

[–] Atlas_@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

People can die on the trolley,

Also you're assuming the collatz conjecture.

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 months ago

If someone dies due to extraneous circumstances, they would die either way so it doesn't have to factor into your considerations on whether or not to pull the lever.

And while I haven't done a geometric proof to show that for all odd numbers, it will eventually reduce to one, I've worked out the sets for every odd number up to twenty and the pattern holds. While that's not rigorous enough for a theorem, it's good enough for me.