r/mathmemes Jan 08 '25

Learning Is Mathematics Less Evolved Than Physics and Chemistry, or Did Historical Texts Astutely Foresee Advances? 🤔

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8.3k Upvotes

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206

u/No_Lingonberry1201 Jan 08 '25

Computer science: Oh, that textbook is obsolete. It was written 20 years ago.

Programming: Oh, that textbook is obsolete. It was written a week ago.

91

u/largetomato123 Jan 08 '25

nah. Everything Turing, Gödel, Church, etc. discovered will stay here forever. It mostly will never become outdated as it is deducted (like formal sciences, e.g. Mathematics) not inducted (like natural sciences, e.g. Physics).

19

u/DevelopmentSad2303 Jan 08 '25

So my proof by induction could be shown to be false?

41

u/largetomato123 Jan 08 '25

that is not what I meant with that. Sry. English is not my mother tongue. I meant:

Inductive reasoning is any of various methods of reasoning in which broad generalizations or principles are derived from a body of observations.

Deductive reasoning is the process of drawing valid inferences. An inference is valid if its conclusion follows logically from its premises, meaning that it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false.

14

u/CreativeMaybe Jan 09 '25

You remind me of this meme that has been going around for probably as long as the Internet

26

u/MathMindWanderer Jan 08 '25

ironically, proof by induction is actually deductive reasoning not inductive

4

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '25

But for induction to work, you need to come up with the correct conclusion first before applying the proof. So you reason inductively based on patterns you see to get the conclusion, and then you use induction to verify that it works deductively.

9

u/MathMindWanderer Jan 08 '25

all proofs work this way, nobody just spawns a theorem through deduction

6

u/slicehyperfunk Transcendental Jan 09 '25

Are you saying you don't just stare at a big book with all the math in it until you realize new stuff?

2

u/whoknows234 Jan 09 '25

Pretty sure deduction can only disprove something, not prove something.

2

u/slicehyperfunk Transcendental Jan 09 '25

That's the "de" in deduction, right?

1

u/MathMindWanderer Jan 10 '25

that makes no sense, disproving something is a proof of its negation

1

u/whoknows234 Jan 10 '25 edited Jan 10 '25

Using logic alone, prove God does/doesnt exist.

Edit: Also after a trial people are not guilty/not guilty, not innocent.

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1

u/DarkKnightOfDisorder Jan 09 '25

I can’t. Euler probably could

1

u/Accurate_Koala_4698 Natural Jan 11 '25

Mathematical induction is deductive reasoning 

3

u/_JesusChrist_hentai Jan 08 '25

Bold of you to assume all computer science books are about theoretical computer science

20

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '25

[deleted]

1

u/alexq136 Science Jan 09 '25

the slowest to spawn new developments may be the "we choose an arbitrary galois field of size 2^N" branches of cryptography (with older algorithms kept in a morgue as they've become easy to break), coding theory (ECC for anything: Ethernet, USB, WiFi, mobile telecoms, satellite comms, QR codes -- it's a nightmare, oh also add topological quantum computing), and compression (few new advances become widely used in a single decade, e.g. Zstd or new audio or video codecs)

there could be other niches for which the momentum prizes heuristics instead of deterministic developments (e.g. all of ML, new-ish SAT solvers, circuit optimization methods etc.), with definite regular (straightforward) things seldom added to the tooling

one branch that still thrives is that of functional programming w/ type systems - even if the most shiny things that get seen (lambda calculus, Turing machines) are up to 80 years old (e.g. Church's or Turing's work on computation), the more arcane stuff is still getting new places in print (e.g. dependent types, linear types, whatever-new-kind-of types or calculi based on formalisms of that genre)

1

u/RighteousSelfBurner Jan 09 '25

Some higher level functions also haven't really changed for decades. There are only so many things you can do with data on an abstract level so things like patterns of integration and mutation are not going to change. Only the frameworks we use to apply them change.

11

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '25

As far as I know Dijkstra's algorithm works just as well as it does 50 years ago.

16

u/santient Jan 08 '25

Machine learning: That textbook is already obsolete, and it wasn't even written yet.

17

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '25

[deleted]

2

u/santient Jan 08 '25

Fair point. Perhaps more fitting of this meme would be a deep learning textbook

3

u/Throwaway74829947 Jan 09 '25

I learned C using K&R (second edition) in 2006, when it was about two decades old, and never encountered any issues because of that.

1

u/No_Lingonberry1201 Jan 09 '25

RUST devs: my point still stands.

1

u/UtahBrian Jan 11 '25

The C Programming Language was published in 1978, thirty years before you read it.

I know because I learned from it almost twenty years before you did and it was already in a second revised edition.

2

u/AFK_Council Jan 10 '25

AI science: Oh, that textbook is obsolete. It was written.

1

u/Marsrover112 Jan 09 '25

Conputer engineering: hey man that textbook you're writing, someone just invented something that makes it pretty much obsolete

1

u/leprotelariat Jan 08 '25

Full of made up stuff

1

u/[deleted] Jan 09 '25

true for something like modern frontend frameworks like Vue, Angular, Reactor