Slashdot Mirror
Major Advances In Knot Theory
An anonymous reader sends us to Science News, which is running a survey of recent strides in finding an answer to the age-old question: How many ways are there to tie your shoelaces? "Mathematicians have been puzzling over that question for a century or two, and the main thing they've discovered is that the question is really, really hard. In the last decade, though, they've developed some powerful new tools inspired by physics that have pried a few answers from the universe's clutches. Even more exciting is that the new tools seem to be the tip of a much larger theory that mathematicians are just beginning to uncover. That larger mathematical theory, if it exists, may help crack some of the hardest mathematical questions there are, questions about the mathematical structure of the three- and four-dimensional space where we live. ... Revealing the full ... superstructure may be the work of a generation."
How many ways are there to tie your shoelaces? The answer is very easy ... knot.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
So, can we abbreviate this "knot theory" to "!theory"?
Anybody want my mod points?
Let me introduce you to ^W.
It's a great tool for those writing pseudo-ironic posts who are, at the same time, concerned with the preservation of the valuable resource of ones and zeroes...
I'm just wondering. One never knows with math.
I prefer the "velcro" theory.
It's all history, man. -anon
Its actually 84. You forgot that you can always double-knot each of them too.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Back when I was going to school for my Elementary School diploma, I was force-fed a lot of arithmetic.
Roughly twice as much as was typical, because my disinterest (and the resultant lack of success) required me to take almost every grade twice.
No sooner was I free of school than I brain-dumped every single addition, multiplication, subtraction, division, counting... the lot of it. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
And then, some time later, I was trying to make my paycheck go farther. The problem was optimising the spending for maximum personal happiness, and to that end, I had collected all of my receipts so that I could record where I was spending my money during the month.
Pretty soon, I had tons of data indicating where my money was going. Pretty numbers, but aside from a few expensive items, pretty useless.
Until I started thinking about what I could do with a set of numbers.
That's right - my old arch-nemesis, arithmetic, suddenly proved useful. Summing the money spent in different categories gave me totals, and suddenly I knew EXACTLY where my money was going in an actual month. Given that I had measured how much money was spent on each purchase (that's how receipts work) I could now properly budget my spending.
That resulted in a HUGE leap forward in my quality of life.
Don't dis abstract math - you never know when it'll pay off.
AC