Vertasium on 37: https://youtu.be/d6iQrh2TK98
What if I think that all of the numbers are uninteresting? Does that make them all interesting? But doesn’t that, in turn, make all of them uninteresting?
c/SyndromeDidNothingWrong
🤯
Suppose that’s why it’s called a paradox
“Noteworthy” and “interesting” aren’t synonyms.
Gad, you’ve got me doing it!
“Remarkable.” “Fascinating.”
You may think you’re a Trekkie, but did you know that the first Star Trek parody show was a one season flop called “Quark?” It was about an interstellar garbage scow, and it had a crew including two clones.
1730 seems pretty uninteresting to me, and that hasn’t changed after taking a few minutes to check if there’s anything that makes it less than dull.
1729 is a very interesting number.
1730… is not.
So, I picked it by choosing 12^3 + 2. I wanted to start with something easily factored (power of 12) and not too small, but not interesting because of its factorization. And I wanted it to be even, since odd numbers tend to have funny quirks. So a simple +2.
What’s amusing is that I did this before looking at the Wikipedia page. According to that, the original number that inspired this paradox was 1729. So just by happenstance, I picked one integer higher than the original “uninteresting” number. Which I guess arguably makes 1730 interesting now (though admittedly not for mathematical reasons).
And so it becomes true.
Here’s a nerdy math way.
Assume that some numbers are not interesting. Let n be the smallest non-interesting number. Since n is the smallest number that’s not interesting, it is interesting.
I don’t think I can think of anything less interesting than a grade school pseudo-paradox.
But if 2 numbers arent interesting, they wont become interesting from not being interesting because there are multiple of them
It’s kind of interesting that there are 2 of them.
the interestingness of numbers is a field that fulfills Laplace’s equation, with the constraint that 0 is infinitely interesting, and the interestingness converges to zero for n -> infinity.
Four
Four is bad luck in Japanese superstition, because its pronunciation (‘shi’) is the same as the word for ‘death’.
