Mastodawn

I love Numberphile, and I love this kind of Numberphile specifically: here, starting from small numbers using ideas and operations that are extremely easy to understand and (at some scale) iterate by hand, is a wild unsolved problem absolutely beyond the reach of our current mathematical or computational capacities:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OtYKDzXwDEE&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D%3D

An amazing thing about 276 - Numberphile

YouTube

I think the thing I love most about this is that is, like so much involving prime numbers and factorization, an extremely powerful brand of catnip for amateur crank mathematicians such as myself. You can _kind of see_ the patterns there! There are the barest hints of a _lot_ of subtle structure. The secret must be within our grasp!

I mean, does this not look _just like_ the 3x+1 problem, turned on its head? Almost? Maybe?

And yet.... and yet....

C. S. Lewis once described The Occult as a series of nested snares, symbols for symbols for symbols without ultimate referent, a machine purpose-built to be an intellectual rat hole, seducing and confusing the inquisitive mind, snaring the most inquisitive of minds that much more effectively.

But, in a very Lovecraftian way, there are things that we can find right here in nature fully capable of that, of having the shape of the occult - or rather, a true shape, aped badly by the occult.

You can see why so much of occultism falls back on the iconology of pure math disciplines, how many symbols and ceremonies are just algebraics and slow chanting, how far you can take a cult with some graph theory and a disused cathedral. Adding the ill-mixed flavor of the true incomprehensible infinite to your game of cryptosefirotic rune-scrabble in an exercise in semiotic aura farming is a temptation that has no name, that we respond to with a reflex older than language.

Matthew Lyon 3d ago

@mhoye with a foot in both graphic design and music disciplines, this sort of this is so very pervasive in both; “sacred geometry" is basically this for designers, and the history of western harmony is littered with attempts at the idea of making divine ideals fit inside a practical world

@mhoye math is perfect to construct the religion of a fantasy world around. The orthonormal church searching for truth without ambiguity and fighting the catenoid heretics and their axiom of choice, while publishing a new catechism full of proofs to learn.

The admin of my math faculty discord (called hall of enlightenment) actually has the role of His Existence and Uniqueness: The Pope (roughly translated German), moderators are acolytes etc.

@mhoye 'Cryptosefirotic' almost had me inhaling my tea. Watch where you point that thing, please; it's almost certainly loaded. (Honest question: do you expect your audience to parse the word on their own, or should we just accept the dictionary-diving as a side-quest along the journey?)

@dubious_dragon At this point I just have to trust my audience to know they have to buckle their seatbelts and keep their hands inside the ride.

@mhoye That's entirely fair. It's been a long time since I've stretched my morphological horizons that much; it's probably good for me.

Martin Vermeer FCD 2d ago

@mhoye Getting a lot out of (almost) nothing makes one think of the origin of the universe. Or the attempts at a 'theory of everything'. Almost as if there is something sacred about it.

@mhoye don't follow the objects best not named unless one wants people to follow them out into the depths lest you turn into an algebraic number theorist, for if you do, you will never forget the horrors that lurk behind the number two.

Emma needs ☕️ and paying work 3d ago

@feonixrift @mhoye and monsters hiding in the numbers is Charlie Stross' _Laundry Files_ books.

@feonixrift @mhoye ahahaha "never forget the horrors that lurk behind the number 2" is a tremendous line

@feonixrift Hippasus deserved it.

Emma needs ☕️ and paying work 3d ago

@mhoye an occult website.

https://www.aliquot.de/aliquote.htm

ALIQUOT PAGE - Prime families - Primzahlfamilien

To proof Catalans conjecture needs many aliquot sequences. The programmes (download) factorize up to 120 digits.

@mhoye
I immediately recalled this movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_%28film%29?wprov=sfla1 that is a whole thing about endless search of patterns.

Pi (film) - Wikipedia

@gemelen I quote from that movie all the time. "As soon as you discard scientific rigour, you're no longer a mathematician. You're a numerologist."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1IzNKIHhp0

Pi (1998) -- Number Theory vs. Numerology

YouTube