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LOL you guys get it?

\[\infty - 4 \cdot \infty = \frac{1}{4}\]

@freemo
Not really. Did the subtraction, and get:

\[\ -3 \cdot \infty = \frac{1}{4}\]

Surely I am doing the wrong thing?

@design_RG yup, isolate the \(\infty\) and it might give you a hint as to the source of the joke.. if not ill give you the whole bit

@freemo Thank you!

I already enjoyed seeing how you did the nice formatting - exposed in teh Toot editor when I was responding. Very nice result.

Will need to think about the meaning, next step or get the joke. 😉

@design_RG You may not know enough math to get it to be honest.. If you don;t see it now you probably wont get it :)

@freemo Yes, I recognize my limits.

Quantum mechanics and String Theory, particularly, fly right over my head.

Operating with the infinities above even made me think if it was a legitimate thing to do. 🤔

@design_RG You wouldnt be the first person. Yet somehow it seems to work in the real world...

@freemo That is a nice explanation. Very rarefied territory. Wow. 😮

@design_RG Its a common math joke, people say \(\infty = -\frac{1}{12}\) for the lawls.

@freemo I can see the 'divide by -3' step leadign to that result, but the final line is absurd, imo.

So, where did we break it? Infinity can't be equal to any number, including the poor little negative one twelfth.

/me suspects some logical violation on previous steps.

@design_RG Well thats the joke. In reality no mathematician is claiming that infinity is equal to \(-\frac{1}{12}\) thats the joke.

What they are claiming however is that depending on what process you use to sum up all the natural numbers, you will get either infinity or \(-\frac{1}{12}\). In other words it is another (valid) way to sum the infinite series to get a real value.

As a bit of an analogy we know the roots of 100 are both -10 and 10. But despite that fact we can not go so far as to claim -10 and 10 are equal to each other.

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