Do you fill out a form, or fill in a form?
Is hydrogen gas flammable or inflammable?
What's the difference between the roots of the words "terrific" and "terrible"?
Natural language is full of stupid things like this, but meaning is contained largely in context, so we can live with it.
I imagine most mathematicians would argue that anything that can be said in a single sentence in isolation is imprecise enough that they don't really care.
I imagine the published paper will be more precise, and I encourage you to read it if you are interested in specifics. Otherwise, the point of the article is that fractals are useful, number theory has interesting and unsolved problems, and that mathematics requires more than sitting at a desk calculating things (as vague as these ideas might be).
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Do you fill out a form, or fill in a form? Is hydrogen gas flammable or inflammable? What's the difference between the roots of the words "terrific" and "terrible"? Natural language is full of stupid things like this, but meaning is contained largely in context, so we can live with it.
Just saying, most of the time I would prefer the robot.
I imagine most mathematicians would argue that anything that can be said in a single sentence in isolation is imprecise enough that they don't really care. I imagine the published paper will be more precise, and I encourage you to read it if you are interested in specifics. Otherwise, the point of the article is that fractals are useful, number theory has interesting and unsolved problems, and that mathematics requires more than sitting at a desk calculating things (as vague as these ideas might be).
What they should have said is: The two quadrillionth digit in the binary expansion of pi is 0.