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Legends of flight (media.piefed.world)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/tenforward@lemmy.world
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[–] 11 points 5 months ago (7 children)

A starship captain being really good at math wouldn't surprise me. These people are steeped in science and math since they went to the academy, if not before. And if you're going to live on a starship light years from home you're gonna pick up a bunch of hobbies to keep you busy. Doing math problems seems exactly the type of hobby JL would pick up.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Also today people can learn advanced calculus in high school, and there’s been advocation for people to begin calculus in elementary school. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think that they have highly advanced math education in the future.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

    "being really good at math" is not like acing your high school math test. lot of people are "really good in math" and get some math as part of their curriculum - physicists, computer scientists, engineers... absolvents of starfleet academy, i guess.

    doing high level math means you get bc, masters, phd in math, you spend 10 years doing pure math before you even leave school, then you spend another 30 to 50 years doing pure math, and if you are lucky, your research area will one day somehow connects to the unfinished problem and it clicks for you.

    it is not a hobby you pick up between poker and rubic's cube, just because you like puzzles.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (3 children)

    Dropping the societal expectations of our time, one who has an aptitude for math in a post scarcity environment could simply choose to pursue some avenue therein. You'd think that would still have to be a large portion of focus, but we can give Picard some benefit of the doubt for being good at whatever field, plus his other hobbies and interests.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    picard is free to pursue his hobbies, but math on this level is not a hobby. it is a full time work for which picard has neither education, nor the time. it is not like you stare at the blank paper for a 30 minutes a day hoping something will happen.

    Wiles was working on a completely different problem, which ultimately clicked for him and allowed him to transfer the findings to the FLT. but he was a person with really specialized knowledge that he spent long time acquiring.

    this whole argument is like showing picard doing some advanced neurosurgery that no neurosurgeon in a known universe can do, just to kill some time between bridge shift and holodeck, because why not, he passed the basic medical in a starfleet academy, so why couldn't he pick up a hobby? it would be immediately clear how absurd such scene would be.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    You don't have to be Wiles to attempt unsuccessfully to prove the theorem. Fermat famously claimed to have a simple and elegant proof. Before we understood how to actually prove it, there was always a small chance that maybe there was such a proof and all we needed was the right type of creative lateral thinking to rediscover it. That's what Picard was doing. Now that we understand the problem better, nobody really thinks such a proof exists, but that wasn't as well known at the time the episode was written.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    nobody really thinks such a proof exists, but that wasn’t as well known at the time the episode was written

    that's incorrect. there were attempts at a proof by lame and kummer around the half of 19th century and no later than that people were aware that mentioned fermat's notice was probably bullshit - he either made a mistake, or had proof for some narrow case which he wrongly assumed was general proof.

    it was clear at that point that there is no proof that would be discoverable by someone without proper mathematical education just because he "had an idea".

    you can of course argue that doesn't mean picard couldn't attempt that, but it is quite a stretch. reality is, that some writer read about it somewhere and incorporated it into the script without thinking about it twice and as a result gave us this joke, because - well - predicting future is hard.

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