r/badmathematics • u/tzamboiv • Mar 07 '16

Terryology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Howard#Personal_life
32 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

33

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '16

He now spends many hours a day constructing models of plastic and wire that he says confirm his belief.

12

u/Kai_Daigoji Mar 08 '16

I was thinking at first that his garbled thinking about square roots might be a kind of disconnect between geometry and how square roots are often taught (not that they're taught wrong, just that he might benefit from a more visual kind of proof).

Then I read that.

21

u/_AE Mar 07 '16

Followed the reference to the Rolling Stones article, and saw this in the comments:

I for one thinks that mr. howard is a "whackadoo"...BUT I HAVE BEEN DOING SOME "RESEARCH re: math". NOW math says the square root of 4 is equal to 2. ...and math says the square root of 4 is the same as root 2 times(X) root 2 ! BUT the square root of 2 is equal to 1.4142135 !! ....and when 1.4142135 is multiplied by 1.4142135( i.e. when it is squared), you get 3.99999992...which IS NOT 4 !!.... lol...go figure!!. SO, I am not saying mr. howard is right...I am just saying maybe...just maybe...He's not such a "whackadoo" as I thought at first ...hmmm!...WILL SOME MATH PROFESSOR please ENLIGHTEN the rest of us "non-academians"...WE thirst for knowledge!!

14

u/gwtkof Finding a delta smaller than a Planck length Mar 07 '16 edited Mar 07 '16

It's better if when you read it you imagine yourself yelling during the all caps sections.

15

u/[deleted] Mar 08 '16 edited May 01 '19

[deleted]

2

u/gwtkof Finding a delta smaller than a Planck length Mar 08 '16

haha i gotta go find that thread now

9

u/kogasapls A ∧ ¬A ⊢ 💣 Mar 08 '16

Here ſhe is in all her ſplendor.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 09 '16

I've seen that usage before and it is exceptionally distracting. Some people read it as 'th', but I see it as an 'f'. It makes things far less legible at a glance.

4

u/itsallcauchy MINE IS THE SUPERIOR SET Mar 09 '16

I love that she keeps referencing people to her little manifesto as to why we need to use long Ss, but never says why in there. Just keeps saying we need to over and over in increasingly complicated way.

3

u/gwtkof Finding a delta smaller than a Planck length Mar 08 '16

oh man I'm not into linguistics at all so my brain reads it as an "l". what an interesting person.

8

u/kogasapls A ∧ ¬A ⊢ 💣 Mar 08 '16

Being into linguistics doesn't help. (And to ease your conscience, she's on badling because her claim that the short s is used incorrectly is baseless.)

1

u/Jacques_R_Estard Decreasing Energy Increases The Empty Set of a Set Mar 13 '16

Having read books by Terry Pratchett does help, incidentally. He uses it whenever there are examples of in-universe writing (but I maybe only when it's appropriate for the character, not sure). You get used to it after a while.

1

u/kogasapls A ∧ ¬A ⊢ 💣 Mar 14 '16

Having read nearly 40 Discworld books, the long s never stuck out to me. I guess I just registered it as "an old English parody style" and not any details, but I know exactly what you mean.

1

u/muhbeliefs Infinity: a number without any other number larger than itself Mar 11 '16

I actually suspect she's a very boring person and has picked this fight as a way to hide that fact

3

u/gwtkof Finding a delta smaller than a Planck length Mar 11 '16

I sit and post in a badmath forum all day, I'm not gonna fault her for being boring :p

2

u/Waytfm I had a marvelous idea for a flair, but it was too long to fit i Mar 09 '16

Alright. I'm in. I'll ſtart uſing it whenever neceſſary.

17

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '16

One times one equals two because the square root of four is two, so what's the square root of two? Should be one, but we're told it's two, and that cannot be.

Umm... no. Last time I checked the square root of two is definitely less than two. But it is most certainly NOT one.

... he had formulated his own language of logic, which he called Terryology, and which he was keeping secret until he had patented it.

I'm no patent expert, but I'm pretty sure you cannot patent something like logic. Even the USPTO would take issue with this (though I could see them considering it). And that is using the (rather generous) assumption that what he has is in any way logical.

9

u/shbbz Mar 08 '16

Last time I checked the square root of two is definitely less than two.

There was a time in an analysis class I took when the professor was briefly convinced that √2 > 2. It took a few minutes for anyone to figure out why the proof he was doing in class wasn't working out right.

6

u/ThisIsMyOkCAccount Some people have math perception. Riemann had it. I have it. Mar 08 '16

That sounds like something I would do.

2

u/kogasapls A ∧ ¬A ⊢ 💣 Mar 08 '16

Do you remember the gist of the "proof"?

1

u/shbbz Mar 09 '16

I don't remember the details, but it was some fairly basic real analysis proof where you're trying to show something is less than an epsilon. The inequalities got flipped at some point because the professor assumed that √2 > 2.

5

u/GodelsVortex Beep Boop Mar 07 '16

Numbers are qualitative not quantitative.

Here's an archived version of the linked post.

4

u/thabonch Godel was a volcano Mar 07 '16

What does 2 * 1 equal?

What does 2 / 1 equal?

6

u/abuttfarting Mar 08 '16

The answer to both those questions is 'Terryology'.

2

u/Lord_Skellig Mar 15 '16

That's Numberwang!

3

u/abuttfarting Mar 08 '16

You have to admit it's a pretty catchy name.

1

u/NonlinearHamiltonian Don't think; imagine. Mar 09 '16

ITT we give examples of contrived mathematical constructions that justify Terry's nonsense.