I mean, there must be a reason why wizards are constantly perplexed by muggle technology.
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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And why goblins have to do their accounting for them.
The series would have ended much sooner if Harry had brought an AK47 to hogwarts
Although that could also be them being perplexed by the fact that muggles did it with no magic at all.
Imagine us discovering a species that developed computers and tech just like ours, but using neither transistors nor electricity.
I'm not familiar with the series, what's muggle technology?
Muggles is wizard slang for non-magical human beings. Like Darren on Bewitched would be a muggle. He cooks his food using an oven instead of magic. The oven is muggle tech.
Muggle is a racial slur used by magic-able people to refer to magic disabled people.
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Non magical people living in the real world. It's you. You're a muggle.
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Hermione mentioned in the first book that wizards tend to absolutely suck at things that are typically Muggle, like logic, so it follows that they probably suck at math too.
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I mean, the very existence of magic kind of nullifies the concept of math as a means to ascertain objective fact.
What good is 2+2 when 2 eyes of newt plus 2 legs of frog leads to random quantities of dancing forks with literally no respect as to the how because magic?
Math can't quantify a world where physical laws are replaced by literal nonsense, and if math could ultimately explain the mechanics of magic and predict the outcomes of its applications, the magic wouldn't be magic anymore, it would just be another great force of the universe like gravity or electromagnetism to be mapped by the scientific community.
I always wondered the opposite of the harry potter universe.
So much of math was difficult to teach or obscure because of difficulties in visualization or computation. Surely there would have been at least one wizard over hundreds of years that could figure out how to use the powers of illusion magic to visualize things? To demonstrate integrals to the unfamiliar? To render a fractal like a julia set?
Even if magic iteslf followed little internal logic, it could be used as a tool, surely? But that's the sort of fridge logic (warning tv tropes link) that maybe didn't belong in a story book like Harry Potter. I had to stop reading anyway around the time house elves were introduced, anyway. I took issue with that stuff even when I was a kid.
Exactly what more than 5th grade math do you need in such world?
I think a lot of people forget what they learn in 5th grade math. You learn negative numbers. You learn unit conversion, fraction, prime, square roots.
Would more math help absolutely. Especially with the logic wizard seems to lack. But it is not like many people use higher level math today anyway.
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If you haven't already, take a peek at Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It's fanfiction, but absolutely worth a read.
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"Arithmancy" is their name for math classes and is mentioned several times throughout the books. It is one of Hermione's favorite subjects.
At one point, the real world evil witch that is JK Rowling suggested that Arithmancy is like dviniation, but with math, saying they use numbers to predict the future. I take this to mean that the wizarding community discovered calculus independently from the rest of the world and mistook it for a new form of magic.
Divination with maths is statistics.
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To be fair, I suspect the average adult in real life probably only remembers, and uses, 5th grade math.
Facts
Source: self
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Who needs math when you have magic?
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My wife, who is a big potter fan, told me they take traditional classes as well, but they are shown off screen as they aren't interesting to the story.
Pretty sure they explicitly talk about those kind of classes in the books. They don't have scenes in them, but I remember Ron and Harry complaining about arithmetic, or mathematics, or something like that.
"Arithmancy" is what they call their math disciplines and it's mentioned a fair bit in the books, though understandably never really shown in the movies.
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I'm sure Hogwarts also covered general education stuff but that would be boring to us so they focused on the magic stuff. That's my theory though.
They literally go through the class schedule in each book. General studies are not in it.
Can you imagine how absolutely ignorant the average Hogwarts student must be then?
Wizards are, as a whole, pretty damn stupid in that universe to be fair
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Boring? This is the same universe where wizards canonically defecated in the streets and used fecal vanishing spells.
However, when Hogwarts’ plumbing became more elaborate in the eighteenth century (this was a rare instance of wizards copying Muggles, because hitherto they simply relieved themselves wherever they stood, and vanished the evidence), the entrance to the Chamber was threatened, being located on the site of a proposed bathroom.
https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/chamber-of-secrets
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I’m just over here chuckling at your casual statement that Hagrid abducted Harry.
He broke down his door, mutilated his cousin, threatened his uncle, then lured Harry away with cake (which was eaten by said cousin).
arithmancy - which is pseudomaths in a sense....
Isn't arithmetic a class in Hogwarts and just a fancy word for maths (not a native speaker)? I think only Hermione takes it though and it's only mentioned in the books.
~~arithmetic~~ arithmancy
source :
Arithmancy | Harry Potter Wiki
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Arithmancy
I think you're right. They probably don't know math. I mean, what would they need it for? They probably don't have to follow the laws of physics for the most part. If math is done it's probably 100% recreational.
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So that would put him only a couple years ahead of most republicans
They have arithmancy but Harry never took it AFAIK
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