I'm too stupid for this

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• Septimaeus@infosec.pub ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  ![Cropped image of a textbook page with an anecdote which reads “One day Shizuo Kakutani (1911- ) was teaching a class at Yale. He wrote down a lemma on the blackboard and announced that the proof was obvi-ous. One student timidly raised his hand and said that it wasn’t obvious to him. Could Kakutani explain? After several moments’ thought, Kakutani realized that he could not himself prove the lemma. He apologized, and said that he would report back at their next class meeting.

  After class, Kakutani went straight to his office. He labored for quite a time and found that he could not prove the pesky lemma. He skipped lunch and went to the library to track down the lemma. After much work, he finally found the original paper. The lemma was stated clearly and suc-cinctly. For the proof, the author had written, ‘Exercise for the reader.’ The author of this 1941 paper was Kakutani.”](infosec.pub/…/002ff7df-2a30-4b8c-9a2d-7fd2206a442…)

  Classic anecdote of the missing proof for Shizuo Kakutani’s lemma.

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  • icelimit@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    What happened then?

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    • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Actually seems like it might be an apocryphal story.

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    • ameancow@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’m pretty sure everyone clapped.

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• ftp@feddit.uk ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Mathematicians frequently use phrases like It’s obvious or It’s easy to see, which can be profoundly discouraging for a student who does not immediately find a concept simple. In math, grappling with extremely difficult problems is part of the learning process. “A challenging experience,” Ardila told me, “can easily become an alienating one.” It’s especially important to make sure that students are not discouraged during early challenges—what’s hard to see now may become easier in time. He struck this typically demoralizing math language from his teaching.

  www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/…/620207/

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  • starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    This is something I’ve been thinking about recently, I’ll see something that is way too complex for me, and think “well this person is just smarter I could never do that.” After 3 months of doing simpler stuff, it now seems challenging but doable. Just doing something for long enough, even pretty complex things become second nature.

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  • bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Most things are hard until you get them. But that’s especially true in Maths. From elementary school to university until the necessary neurons in your head connect every problem seems daunting at first. But once you see what the actual problem is, once you see what tricks can be used they become trivial to solve.

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    • burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Chemistry was worse than math for me. Somehow they expected you to remember a variation of a formula from way far back, and understand that you could now use a different notation system to derive another, third formula from a new formula that you had just learned… but didn’t explain that and just threw that new third formula (with entirely different units/inputs) at you and it always was a slog to go track down how it all went together because the mental concepts just didn’t flow. I don’t even remember the name of the textbook or the professor of the class, but I still remember those stupid blue boxes in the textbook where mental mindfuck took place.

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    • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’ve tutored calculus, and probably the biggest example I’ve seen of this is the difference quotient. The formula is exceedingly obvious once you understand it, but it takes a lot of people some time for it to “click”.

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  • cashsky@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Sometimes you just need it explained like you are five or something that was explained earlier in the “concepts” section of the textbook needs to be explained explicitly during the problem demonstration sections. And on top of that repeated explanation of the same concept is another key factor in solidifying concepts but I’ve found math and physics books to be so lacking in this that it’s as if they are trying to hit the absolute minimum number of word count a textbook can have. Was very frustrating during college.

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• DagwoodIII@piefed.social ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Old joke.

  Professor writes a formula on the blackboard. He says “Obviously, this is…” Then he stops, looks at the formula and rushes out of the room.

  The next day class resumes. the professor walks in with a big smile on his face.

  “I was correct. It is obvious!”

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• abbadon420@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I’m too stupid for this

  Obviously…

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  • marcos@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That one is “evidently”. It wasn’t obvious until you tried.

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    • TeddE@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      … obviously /s

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  • jenny_ball@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    that’s how athletes talk in interviews to avoid saying anything

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• phpinjected@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  chatgpt werks

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• flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Ah favorite words of professors everywhere
  “obviously”
  “simply”
  “trivially”

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  • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I had a linear algebra professor who did that all the time. Never did figure out what an eigenvector is not why I would want 14 ways of finding one. Brilliant man, terrible teacher.

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    • lemmyman@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      An eigenvector is just kind of the direction the matrix is pointing

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    • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      When you multiply a matrix and a vector, you get a new vector. An eigenvector of a matrix means the output and input vectors are pointing in the same direction.

      These are important for various real-world applications, but more explanation would probably have to be context specific.

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    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      This sounds exactly like my experience with that subject in college. Makes me wonder if it’s the same guy, or if they’re just all like that. Don’t think I can remember his name anyway.

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    • marcos@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The problem is that the eigenvector is the thing that satisfies the equation he showed you. That’s what it is.

      Mathematics is full of completely unsatisfying answers, and only when apply it you get any meaningful idea why those things exist. But those are not their definition.

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    • Klear@quokk.au ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      https://youtu.be/PFDu9oVAE-g

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  • InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Hitler learns Jackson em

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    • affenlehrer@feddit.org ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Not really funny, at least for me as a native German speaker. I mean the movie is great and this scene in particular but the subtitles don’t work if you understand what they say…

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• M1k3y@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Proof by intimidation

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• Fmstrat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  If you have to tell someone something, it means the something is not obvious.

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• pruwybn@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.

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• niktemadur@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Trivial.
  Naive.
  Elegant.
  “Energy”.
  “Entropy”.
  I mean… lasers, man… how DO they work?

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• loldog191@lemmy.ca ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  the strangest yet most profound things find me while im on shrooms. or maybe that’s only when i start noticing them…

  this post makes so much sense, yet the more i think about it the less sense it makes.

  im gonna go touch grass and look at the light spiders and the strange webs they weave now

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  • loldog191@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    holy shit i solved it.

    THE PURPOSE OF LIFE IS TO DO SOMETHING

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    • ExtremeUnicorn@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Self-help singh would disagree.

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• espurr@sopuli.xyz ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It’s so blatant!

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