Cantor's Paradise
medium.com/cantors-paradise · Group blog · on HN since 2018
Cantor's Paradise is a Medium publication with articles on mathematicians and math topics like Ramanujan summation, Cantor, and von Neumann.
What HN saysHN links it for accessible math articles, with a commenter calling its piece on the -1/12 derivation fantastic and others sharing mathematician profiles.
50HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
162stories submitted
2.4Kstory points
6 years agolast shared
2018people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert?8 people · 160 points · first shared 2019 · 60 comments on HN
- 2The Ramanujan Summation: 1 and 2 and 3 and ⋯ + ∞ = -1/12?6 people · 29 points · first shared 2019 · 3 comments on HN
- 3An introduction to Georg Cantor’s transfinite paradise5 people · 112 points · first shared 2018 · 40 comments on HN
- 4Turing “Uncomputability” – Numbers we can never know the value of5 people · 24 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
- 5The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann4 people · 636 points · first shared 2019 · 319 comments on HN
- 6The Riemann Hypothesis, explained (2016)4 people · 132 points · first shared 2018 · 12 comments on HN
- 7John Nash’s Nobel Prize-winning one-pager4 people · 20 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
- 8The Poincaré Conjecture, Explained4 people · 11 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 9Oppenheimer’s Letter of Recommendation for Richard Feynman (1943)4 people · 5 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 10The Eccentric Father of the Atomic Bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer (2019)3 people · 110 points · first shared 2019 · 35 comments on HN
- 11How to Perform Calendar Calculations in Your Head3 people · 34 points · first shared 2019 · 2 comments on HN
- 12The paper that earned Einstein his Nobel Prize, explained3 people · 24 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
- 13The Golden Age of Quantum Physics3 people · 17 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 14The math of how stock options are priced3 people · 13 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 15The Math Behind That Dick Joke in HBO’s “Silicon Valley”3 people · 8 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
atemerev · 2020-11-27
In physics, it is something related to removing divergences in bosonic string theory, I am not an expert in that. Here, however, is a fantastic article that shows how -1/12 is actually derived: https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-ramanujan-summation-1-2-3-1-12… (spoiler: it is really easy and could be done by a high schooler).
unhammer · 2020-10-07
> at the IAS received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German march music on the gramophone in his office, distracting those in neighboring offices, including Albert Einstein. In fact, von Neumann claimed to do some of his best work in noisy, chaotic environments such as in the living room of his house with the television blaring. Despite being a bad driver, he loved driving, often while reading books, leading to various arrests and accidents.
https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-unparalleled-genius-of-john-vo…
wombatmobile · 2020-09-17
Paul Erdős
https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-mathematical-nomad-paul-erd%C5…
Over the years, Erdős accrued as much fame for his personality as he did for his mathematics. Described by his biographer Paul Hoffman as “probably the most eccentric mathematician in the world”, famously Erdős developed his only language to accompany his unique nomadic lifestyle, referring to himself as a PGOM, LD, AD, LD, CD, a “poor great old man, living dead, archaeological discovery, legally dead, counts dead”. Famously, possessions meant little Erdős, who carried most of his belongings in “two half-full suitcases” as he travelled from institution to institution, living with friends and colleagues.
mikorym · 2019-12-17
Yes. Because of Gödel, von Neumann and others stopped trying to build machines that can prove anything.
Of course, following the critiques and further revisions of Zermelo’s set theory by Fraenkel, Skolem, Hilbert and von Neumann, a young mathematician by the name of Kurt Gödel in 1930 published a paper which would effectively end von Neumann’s efforts in formalist set theory, and indeed Hilbert’s formalist program altogether, his theorem of incompleteness. von Neumann happened to be in the audience when Gödel first presented it [1]
[1] https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-unparalleled-genius-of-john-vo…
thrower123 · 2020-12-08
It's a little bizarre that Kaczynski was a published mathematician of some note before he fell afoul of MK Ultra
https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-mathematics-of-ted-kaczynski-4…
MrXOR · 2020-11-21
Yes, it has a long history. Like most math formulas, it back to Leonhard Euler. Ramanunan proved this series with his summation technique.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_%2B_2_%2B_3_%2B_4_%2B_%E2%8B%AF#Ramanu…
[2] https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-ramanujan-summation-1-2-3-1-12…
jorgenveisdal · 2020-04-03
The archetypal example of the former is Georg Cantor:
https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-nature-of-infinity-and-beyond-…
spieglt · 2019-11-15
Just read this today: https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-unparalleled-genius-of-john-vo…