Dear Comrades,
I happened upon this website today. I haven't time to read it all, but the argument at the very bottom using complex numbers is absurd. His equation i=1/i is wrong from the start. Guess what! If you write something incorrect it leads to something incorrect. Proving what exactly?
Here's the link:
http://www.hyperflight.com/oh-teacher.htm
Cheers,
Drew
3 comments:
I'm upset that there's no e-mail link on that page. I'd love to tell whoever it is how wrong at least five through seven are, since I could do it in my sleep and it's annoying to see such wrongness existing.
Wait, I found a link! I've sent the following e-mail, we'll see how he responds:
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I found your page recently and I wanted to point out something about your Stumper #7, because although on first reading it seems they are all deeply flawed, this one is the most egregious. You have managed, through a reductio ad absurdum proof (the sort you refer to when saying "Euclid, for example..."), that i does not equal 1/i. Congratulations! Now, the real question is, why is this something you have included on your page? No literature has ever claimed that i is equal to 1/i unless through some typo they left out a hyphen. i is in fact equal to -1/i. That is, negative one over i.
This is what the UConn math teacher was trying to point out. You wrote an equation of the form x = 1/x, whose only solutions are +1 and -1. i is not a solution and no-one has ever claimed as much.
In short, again, no-one can dispute that you have proven that i does not equal 1/i. This is however not significant because no scholarship is based upon that equality.
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By the way, was the "UConn math teacher" one of you all?
His response:
When I got the email from the UConn guy he was ouright insulting and, unable to address the problem, he pulled his credentials. His problem is attitude.
Your email is a bit better but it tends to go after a single point: Stumper 7 is no good. It will be difficult to see the real deal through your attitude. I am not presenting the Stumper 7 as a proof. You see it as a proof but -- it is a stumper. So I cannot argue with you as you do not even see the baseline.
Given a certain relation and following legit algebra rules the equation yields two conflicting results. The stumper is to explain why there are different results. I stand by my claim that 99% of math guys are clueless about explaining Stumper 7.
Thank you for your congratulations. My web page has no trivia and you should not expect it to be copies of somebody else's work. Your statement that "no scholarship is based on that equality" does not answer the stumper and it is just as good as "I don't know."
My response to that:
I'm afraid I just don't see why you're presenting it as a "stumper" - it's exactly the same as if you've started from 2 = 3 and then proceeded to show how starting from this point ends in a contradiction. Your other stumpers start with some piece of conventional wisdom and show why that doesn't work (though I would argue there are flaws in either the premise or argument in each of them), so I assumed you were implying that i = 1/i was the conventional wisdom.
What would a satisfactory answer to that question you have posed there be, to you? I can see now that you are hinting that this fact, that i does not equal 1/i, is supposed to give some insight into the nature of numbers. But the answer seems to be no more complicated than that numbers have different values, and two numbers with different values are not equal to each other.
And his final response:
Well, it takes some work. If you start with 2=3 then you can prove there is a contradiction. But when you start with i=1/1 there is contradiction in one case and there is no contradiction in another case. So, that is the stumper. The stumper is not difficult to understand.
The point is that the operation of squaring (Pythagorean square numbers for me) has additional properties that are not readily apparent. On the next level this stumper is also a gateway to other things, such as "why is energy of a moving body proportional to velocity squared?"
Please do not write to me to pick a bone about some "next level." The way it works is that you either get it (and get busy) or you don't get it (and bitch and moan).
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