Slashdot Mirror
Twin Prime Proof Erroneous
mindriot writes "The fairly recent perceived breakthrough in prime number theory regarding twin primes, as mentioned on slashdot, is apparently not quite perfect: 'On April 23rd, Andrew Granville of the Universite de Montreal and K. Soundararajan of the University of Michigan found a technical difficulty buried in one of the arguments in the preprint of Goldston and Yildrim. The main issue is that some quantities which were believed to be small error terms are actually the same order of magnitude as the main term. For now this difficulty remains unresolved.' A more detailed technical description is also available."
Update: "Fist Sport" explained. (05/17/01)
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It has come to my attention that the entire Linux community is a hotbed of so called 'alternative sexuality,' which includes anything from hedonistic orgies to homosexuality to pedophilia.
What better way of demonstrating this than by looking at the hidden messages contained within the names of some of Linux's most outspoken advocates:
Linus Torvalds is an anagram of SLIT ANUS OR VD 'L,' clearly referring to himself by the first initial.
Richard M. Stallman , spokespervert for the Gaysex is Not Unusual 'movement' is an anagram of MANS CRAM THRILL AD.
Alan Cox is barely an anagram of ANAL COX which is just so filthy and unchristian it unnerves me.
I'm sure that Eric S. Raymond, composer of the satanic homosexual propaganda diatribe The Cathedral and the Bizarre, [Buy At Amazon] is probably an anagram of something queer, but we don't need to look that far as we know he's always shoving a gun up some poor little boy's rectum. Update: Eric S. Raymond is actually an anagram for SECONDARY RIM and CORD IN MY ARSE. It just goes to show you that he is indeed queer.
Update the Second: It is also documented that Evil Sicko Gaymond is responsible for a nauseating piece of code called Fetchmail, which is obviously sinister sodomite slang for "Felch Male" - a disgusting practise. For those not in the know, "felching" is the act performed by two perverts wherein one sucks their own post-coital ejaculate out of the other's rectum. In fact, it appears that the dirty Linux faggots set out to undermine the good Republican institution of e-mail, turning it into "e-male."
As far as Richard "(cock)Master" Stallman goes, that filthy fudge-packer was actually quoted on leftist commie propaganda site Salon.com as saying the following:
And this isn't a made up troll bullshit either! He actually stated this tripe, which makes it obvious that he is trying to politely say that he's a flaming homo slut!
Speaking about "flaming," who better to point out as a filthy chutney ferret than Slashdot's very own self-confessed pederast Jon Katz. Although an obvious deviant anagram cannot be found from his name, he has already confessed, nay boasted of the homosexual perversion of corrupting the innocence of young children. To quote from the article linked:
Is this why you were touching your penis in
Oh Ok... that hurt... i dunt know what they were talking about.. that really hurt.... two primes? errors? huh.. someone explain for us burnt out hippies please!
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
How about calculating the rate of ring growth in trees as well? How about the speed that paint will dry at various temperatures?
fp fp fp?
i would like ot say hi to 222yuu
can't see the point in this. I think it's a bit of a waste of time and (even more importantly) computing power. Think of all the good causes, trying to find causes for cancer or AIDS, or seti@home that could have used the computing power to a good purpose.
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Well, everyone makes mistakes. At least they aren't as sux0r as M$.
What does everyone think about that? I'd like to have some other people's opinions here. I value the opinion of the Slashdot community and would appreciate feedback.
HAHAHA you must feel like suck idiots! Next time, check the stories!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The last paragraph of the "more detailed technical description" is interesting (shown here in LaTeX notation):
The consensus is that the definition of $\gamma_R$ needs to be changed so that terms like this one do not appear. However, it is not obvious how to do this change. Work is continuing by Goldston and Yildirim and others to rectify the problem. It does seem reasonable to believe that an improvement on the current world record for small gaps between primes will be achieved by these methods; however, the more dramatic result $p_{n+1} - p_n < (\log n)^\alpha$ for some $\alpha < 1$ seems less likely.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it would be more clear if they said that the inequality above holds for infinitely many $n$, because it certainly couldn't hold for all $n$.
Essentially they're claiming that it's less likely now that the twin prime conjecture will ever be proved using this method, but there's still a pretty reasonable chance that the proof will result in something along the lines that there are infinitely many pairs of consecutive primes that differ only by x, where x is not quite as small as 2 (which is what the twin primes conjecture says) but x is smaller than any value of x that was previously proven. Which would be cool, but nothing to open champagne over.
heard this in an engineering class the other day... What's the contour integral around Western Europe? A: Zero, because all the Poles are in Eastern Europe!
Scott
How much more do we need to know about the causes for cancer or AIDS?
Shouldn't we be looking for the cures instead?
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
And I thought it was just the wrong file name!
The answer is 46.
Damn, I forgot to carry the 1...
...that need better and more powerful mathematics.
Knowledge never is a waste of time.
I have no idea how this proof works because the server melted already.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Their webserver it seems, " is apparently not quite perfect:" It has already been /.ed
Obviously evidence of a conspiracy to cover up the mistakes in the theorem. Sssshhh!
but the space that I'm allowed to type in here is too short.. :-)
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
FAIL FAIL FAIL!
i would like ot say YOU FAIL IT! to 222yuu!
To think you solved something like that, and to be ready to publish, after all that hard work.... then...... oops. guess that doesns't work
man. i feel sorry for those guys
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
aimath.org/primegaps/
aimath.org/primegaps/residueerror/
I'm still working on mirroring all 47 images, but the text is there, and the img tags have great alt text descriptions.
cocksmocking motherfucker
go suck a duck!!!!!!!!
I see a lot about these sorts of massive mathematical problems. I can understand calculating pi to the nth point as it is used in calculations, but what sort of benefit does mankind get from working out twin primes? In fact, do primes do anything for us anyway?
I'm well aware of what primes are, I just have never found a use for them!
This story doesn't have anything to do with SCO! Come on, where's today's SCO story? This isn't funny, man, I need my fix!
Deal with it.
If I knew I was going to get modded "Troll" I would have at least come up with a decent troll :P
Q: What did the constipated mathematician do?
A: He worked it out with a pencil!
Q: What's purple and commutes?
A: An Abelian grape.
Q: Why do you never hear the number 288 on television?
A: It's two gross.
Q: What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a rock climber?
A: Nothing. You can't cross a vector and a scalar.
Q. How many mathematicians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. 1, he gives the lightbulb to 3 engineers, thus reducing the problem to a previously solved joke.
Q: What's big, grey, and proves the uncountability of the reals?
A: Cantor's diagonal elephant.
Q: What's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice?
A: Zorn's Lemon.
Q: What's yellow, normed, and complete?
A: A Bananach space.
Q: What is very old, used by farmers, and obeys the fundamental theorem of arithmetic?
A: An antique tractorisation domain.
Q: What is hallucinogenic and exists for every group with order divisible by p^k?
A: A psilocybin p-subgroup.
Q: What is often used by Canadians to help solve certain differential equations?
A: the Lacrosse transform.
Q: What is clear and used by trendy sophisticated engineers to solve other differential equations?
A: The Perrier transform.
Q: Who knows everything there is to be known about vector analysis?
A: The Oracle of del phi!
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Halfway through a recent airplane flight from Warsaw to New York, there was nearly a major disaster when the flight crew got sick from eating the fish. After they had passed out, one of the flight attendants asked over the intercom if there were any pilots in the cabin.
An elderly gentleman, who had flown a bit in the war, raised his hand and was rushed into the cockpit of the 747. When he got there, took the seat, and saw all the displays and controls, he realized he was in over his head. He told the flight attendant that he didn't think he could fly this plane. When asked why not, he replied,
"I am just a simple Pole in a complex plane"
So, they just had to rely on the method of steepest descents.
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You know that during the Great Flood, Noah brought along two of every species for reproductive purposes. Well, after a few weeks on the ark, all the couples were getting along fine, except for these two snakes. Day and night, Noah worried that this was going to mean the end of this species.
Finally when the flood ended and the ark hit ground, the two snakes darted out of the ship and headed to the nearest picnic table where they started to "go at it". It was then that Noah realized that...
Adders can't multiply without their log tables.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
sumwon bettor tell lairIE/robbIE et ALe.
consult with yOUR creator. that's the spirit.
WOMEN = TIME x MONEY (Logical statement that women require time AND money - statement only TRUE when both "time" and "money" are TRUE) TIME = MONEY ("Time is Money") WOMEN = (MONEY)^2 MONEY = sqrt(EVIL) ("Money is the Root of all evil) WOMEN = (sqrt(EVIL))^2 WOMEN = EVIL
Did Thom Yorke and crew post this?
And because all the digits are even, no matter what base they were written, you will still have an even number unequal 2, and hence will be not a prime.
We know that 42 is the answer, but we don't know what the question is. Clearly we haven't found the question yet.
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
WOMEN = TIME x MONEY (Logical statement that women require time AND money - statement only TRUE when both "time" and "money" are TRUE)
TIME = MONEY ("Time is Money")
WOMEN = (MONEY)^2
MONEY = sqrt(EVIL) ("Money is the Root of all evil)
WOMEN = (sqrt(EVIL))^2
WOMEN = EVIL
Even the most precise calculations don't need that many digits of pi. It's amazing how fast orders of magnitude build up.
Take this extreme example. Suppose you know the radius of the galaxy (define the radius going out to the galactice halo, for instance) to arbitrary precision and your calculation of the circumference is limited only by the precision of pi. If you want to know the circumference town to 10^-15 meters (ie, about the size of an atomic nucleus). How many digits of pi are sufficient?
The radius of the Milky Way galaxy out to the galactic halo is about 65,000 light years, or about 6e20 meters. Only 36 digits of pi would be necessary!!! And this extreme example is of many orders of magnitude larger than precisions of anything that can be calculated in laboratories today. In actuality, one wouldn't really need more then 12-15 digits of pi, if even that much.
make world, not war
2+2 does equal 5, for sufficiently large values of 2.
:)
I love being a mth dork
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
If you're so damn good at factoring products of primes, factorise 18446743979220271189!
it's not pointless, that"s why you were modded down. Now don't ask ME what the point is, i really suck in mathematics (but stil love it though) but if you see somewhere the word 'prime', think computer en/decryption, et. c. i even guess it could be used for cancer research....
I've always had a problem with this proof, not because it claims that women are evil (which they surely are), but because the correct statement should read
WOMEN = TIME + MONEY
since time and money are independent.
What would be really important is to prove the Reimann Hypothesis. That would tell us a lot about the distribution of primes.
If I remember correctly:
;)
true + true = true
true + false = true
false + true = true
false + false = false
and
true x true = true
true x false = false
false x true = false
false x false = false
Which means that addition is like or'ing booleans together and multiplication is like and'ing booleans together. Therefofore, multiplication would seem to be the correct operation, as women are both time and money, not one or the other.
QED
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
sorry, slightly off topic.. but after having a bit of a look around here i've concluded that the most popular phrase on slashdot is 'order of magnitude' :x
Does anyone know if there are any known benefits to having infinitely many twin primes? Are there any unfinished proofs that depend upon this result or the negation thereof? Not there is anything wrong with researching interesting questions - sometimes seemingly idle questions like these can bring very important results, either from the final conclusion or from the process taken to reach the conclusion.
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
next ill hear that war is peace and that the war is in measureable distance of being over... oh wait
"By waging this fight together we will speed the day of final victory," --Dubaya todays retuers
yes i am aware im horribly off topic but i couldnt resist:: may i be modded into oblivion!
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Remember that an error was found when the British mathematician first announced that he had a proof of Fermat's Theorem a few years ago. He was able to fix it, however, and AFAIK his proof is currently considered sound (albeit LONG).
This post is dedicated to all of those
She also has crabs, Taco. Better go back to rimming Cowboi Kneel's blimp-like anus.
It was in here.
Unfortunately, I devoured it. Damn you Bill Cosby!
Perhaps all of the overwhelmingly humorous Slashdotters were also involved. All the laughter from your joke must have caused folks to spit all over their keyboard. In the process of cleaning up, they probably hit the reload button several times, tragically ruining the website. If you would kindly discontiue this, we will not have any future problems.
Here I'll Show you how to factor 27159925611 into its primes
Just keep dividing by primes untill you get one that your number is divisible by
3
27159925611< 7
9053308537< 13
1293329791<
99486907
The result is a factor tree made of all primes, just like the ones you(or I at least) made in junior high
you can derive it from scratch for us...
Why men (and octopuses) cannot juggle a four ball cascade.
The mathematical theory was proved wrong for octapuses and spideroids.
I consider math at this level to be more like art and less like engineering.
You do it because the problem is beautiful and the solution is likely to be beautiful. If you are lucky the solution will turn out to be not only beautiful but also make a statement about life (or some aspect of life).
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
I still wouldn't mind these guys helping me understand my calculus homework...
from the 2+2=5 dept
,
Step 1: -1/1 = 1/-1
Step 2: Taking the square root of both sides:
Step 3: Simplifying:
Step 4: In other words, i/1 = 1/i.
Step 5: Therefore, i / 2 = 1 / (2i),
Step 6: i/2 + 3/(2i) = 1/(2i) + 3/(2i),
Step 7: i (i/2 + 3/(2i) ) = i ( 1/(2i) + 3/(2i) ),
Step 8:
Step 9: (-1)/2 + 3/2 = 1/2 + 3/2,
Step 10: and this shows that 1=2.
therefore 2+2=1+1=3; QED
Thanks for the proof
Didn't the original proof say that there was no limit to the closeness of primes, rather than saying explicitly that twin primes exist to infinity? If I'm right, then it implies that there COULD be an infinite number of twin primes, but it doesn't mean there has to be.
An (American) Indian chief has three wives, all of them pregnant. One day, the village shaman prophesizes that all three women will not only give birth on the same day, but within the same hour! He then goes on to prepare a teepee with three animal skins: a deer, a bear, and a hippopotamus.
Well, the special day finally arrives when all three women go into labor. The shaman directs them to go to the specially prepared tent and each lie down on one of the animal skins.
The woman on the deer skin gives birth first, delivering a 7-pound baby boy.
The woman on the bear skin is next, birthing an 8-pound boy.
However, the woman on the hippopotamus skin, after extensive labor, pops out a 15-pound baby.
What's the moral of this story?
"The son of the squaw of the hippopotamus is equivalent to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides!"
[groan]
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
I am definitely not flaming Dominic the poster, but if all the moderators that read this post understood it then I'd be real freakin' suprised. "Oh look! symbols! [+1 Informative]
Fuck! <> Back to my job at the gas station, I guess....
We calculate PI to the gazillionth diget to see the pictures put there (as a long string of zeros and ones) by a super advanced intellegence.
I am definitely not flaming Dominic the poster, but if all the moderators that read this post understood it then I'd be real freakin' suprised. "Oh look! symbols! [+1 Informative]
:)
No offense taken!
Didn't you read the article, you idiot?
There is a nice distributed calculus that is trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis, it needs your spare cpu cicles for it.
If you can help, and maybe win the 1 million dollar price, take a look at www.zetagrid.net.
Alex
You disgrace us all!
I have a truly wonderful proof of this fact...
but this margin is too small to contain it.
The rest of the human race exists only to serve my needs. If you can't in some way make my life better, then please die, as you are only consuming resources that may possibly be of utility to me.
Pardon my honesty, good sir.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
+1 Right Fucking On!
Uh, yeah. So are my GPG keys safe or what?
Since we're doing the "boolean" thing here, I guess this means that WOMEN can be NOT EVIL.
Looks like their theorem is "not ready for prime time!"
Go suck a penis fagz