i'm pretty good at srb2kart, i think.
27, flygon
icon by @sofsh!
the two kinds of unsolved math problem are "we think it might be infinite but we've solved it definitively up to 12,478,329,709,179,875,728,943,982,427,349,234,293,487" and "we've spent the past thirty years trying to find out if 2 is a valid answer"
I love whatever it is that's wrong with mathematicians
How many kinds of maths problems are there? We think it might be infinite but we're also trying to prove it's just 2.
a lot of problems in topology are only really hard in 3-5 dimensions; fewer makes it easy and more gives you more "structure"
See my favorite pop-math fact that there are infinite regular polygons (2d), five regular polyhedra (3d), three polytopes in 5d and higher, but 4d has, for some reason, six of them: 4d analogs of all the 3d ones, then a bonus one that doesn't exist in any other dimension (the 120-cell).
The 24-cell is the outlier actually, the 120-cell corresponds to the dodecahedron
It took me longer than I'm comfortable admitting to understand that Erdos was talking about the mathematical value of these functions, not their abstract metaphysical or moral value.
“You don’t have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book.” -Paul Erdős, during a lecture in 1985.
Ramsey bounds are in general extremely fucked. It's a great area of math if you want to see things like "We know that for 1 by 3 matrices you need 24 colors, but we don't know how many colors you need for 1 by 4 matrices"
"we should attempt to destroy the aliens" in this case feels like a very roundabout way of saying "we're fucked"
