• @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    656 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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      296 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

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        196 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]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          116 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
            link
            fedilink
            English
            66 months ago

            You forgot p, q

            They can be handy and come before e

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        76 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

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            26 months ago

            Just be sure to do it in binary. You gotta squeeze all of the value out of those phalanges.

            • Dragon Rider (drag)
              link
              fedilink
              English
              16 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.

              • @[email protected]
                link
                fedilink
                English
                16 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.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            36 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:

      • jawa21
        link
        fedilink
        English
        96 months ago

        I do trig for a living. I don’t remember how to do long division at all.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      526 months ago

      memorizing the order of the alphabet would take precious real estate that could instead hold a couple more digits of pi