• affiliate@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    i was in a group call with 6 mathematicians, and it came time to order our names in the paper we were writing. in math papers, the names are always ordered alphabetically. we had to pull up a picture of the alphabet because none of us could remember which way the letters are ordered.

    • pyre@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      memorizing the order of the alphabet would take precious real estate that could instead hold a couple more digits of pi

    • Maalus@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      You guys are mathematicians not letterematicians.

      Also, I’m doing engineering shit and I still need to count using my fingers when calculating something on a multiplication table

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        As a math guy, obviously the order of the letters is: x, y, z, a, b, c, then the rest of them in whatever order I currently feel like.

        As a CS guy, obviously the order is sort( [ set of all letters ] ).

      • affiliate@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        exactly!

        and i am always in favor of counting with fingers. we were given them for a reason, might as well make the most of them. counting is hard enough as it is

            • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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              13 days ago

              That’s impossible, because it would require tracking each digit at once. Counting in binary is kind of possible with fingers, but not with phalanges.

              • Shareni@programming.dev
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                13 days ago

                Counting in binary is kind of possible with fingers

                Kind of? It’s quite possible and easy. I spent an afternoon counting syllables to create shitty poetry, and my fingers started counting on their own. Now I can count to 31 on 1 hand and it’s surprisingly useful.

          • affiliate@lemmy.world
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            13 days ago

            yeah cohomology can be particularly rough. look on the bright side though, at least you now have the tools to answer this question: