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Cake day: August 21st, 2023

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  • RandomWalker@lemmy.worldtoScience MemesZero to hero
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    2 months ago

    Rigorously, yes. Unambiguously, no. Plenty of words (like continuity) can mean different things in different contexts. The important thing isn’t the word, it’s that the word has a clear definition within the context of a proof. Obviously you want to be able to communicate ideas clearly and so a convention of symbols and terms have been established over time, but conventions can change over time too.


  • RandomWalker@lemmy.worldtoScience MemesZero to hero
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    2 months ago

    Natural numbers are used commonly in mathematics across the world. Sequences are fundamental to the field of analysis, and a sequence is a function whose domain is the natural numbers.

    You also need to index sets and those indices are usually natural numbers. Whether you index starting at 0 or 1 is pretty inconsistent, and you end up needing to specify whether or not you include 0 when you talk about the natural numbers.

    Edit: I misread and didn’t see you were talking about whole numbers. I’m going to leave the comment anyway because it’s still kind of relevant.


  • RandomWalker@lemmy.worldtoScience MemesZero to hero
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    2 months ago

    I could be completely wrong, but I doubt any of my (US) professors would reference an ISO definition, and may not even know it exists. Mathematicians in my experience are far less concerned about the terminology or symbols used to describe something as long as they’re clearly defined. In fact, they’ll probably make up their own symbology just because it’s slightly more convenient for their proof.



  • RandomWalker@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes#justwomeninstemthings
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    4 months ago

    The linked article has some top notch mental gymnastics. It goes through great pains to claim that Watson and Crick didn’t steal Franklins’s data (but were extremely cavalier about using it without telling her) and that they would’ve taken anyone’s data, not just a woman’s (although the data had to be brought to their attention because Watson didn’t take any notes on her lecture and instead only paid attention to her appearance).

    I don’t know what drives people to make unfounded assertions defending the legacy of male scientists even while going through such lengths to describe the sexism female scientists faced. It’s like they want to imagine sexism was just something in the air that happened to affect women and not caused or perpetuated by anyone.


  • This sounds like the main problem. They’re assigning you tasks that no one else wants to do or that aren’t high priority. That means the task is difficult or unpleasant in some way, or they don’t actually care that much about it and won’t prioritize anyone else to help resolve your blockers.

    It may be difficult, but I think you should have a conversation with whoever you report to about what their expectations are and how they expect blockers to be resolved if no one prioritizes your tasks. You may need to approach this less defensively and make it clear that clearing these blockers is not your responsibility. If the person you report to isn’t a team lead/manager then I would escalate the problem to a manager and make it clear you’re not getting the resources you need to do your work.