• @affiliate@lemmy.world
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    654 months 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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      514 months 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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      284 months 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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        194 months 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 ] ).

        • Fushuan [he/him]
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          114 months ago

          You forgot i, j, k

          It’s actually x, y, z, a, b, c, i, j, k, e, and then whatever, they don’t matter.

          • 2deck
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            64 months ago

            You forgot p, q

            They can be handy and come before e

      • @affiliate@lemmy.world
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        74 months 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)
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              14 months 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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                14 months 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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            34 months ago

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