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Carrotsticks

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What thing in Maths gave you the equivalent of a 'nerdgasm'? Doesn't have to be something complex (no pun intended), even a fairly trivial but cool result would be alright.
 

Parvee

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I remember the first time I learnt pythagoras theorem I was truly amazed lol
 

barbernator

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when I proved the riemann hypothesis i was like fuaaaaaaaaa
 

AAEldar

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What thing in Maths gave you the equivalent of a 'nerdgasm'? Doesn't have to be something complex (no pun intended), even a fairly trivial but cool result would be alright.
Rank-nullity theorem.

It's useful in a heap of places, I fell in love with it last session.
 

seanieg89

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A short list of mathematical things I find cool, either because the result is nice or there is a really nice proof.

-Euclid's proof of the infinitude of primes.
A VERY old theorem but the proof is strikingly elegant.

-Prime Number Theorem & Dirichlet's Theorem on Arithmetic Progressions
This was my first exposure to analytic number theory, and how the structure of the primes is encoded in the analytic theory of the Riemann zeta function. It seemed like magic at first. In fact most of complex analysis seemed like magic, so I might as well include Cauchy's Integral theorem in this list.

-Cardinality, Countability.
Arguments like Cantor's diagonal argument and the cardinality proof of the existence of transcendentals are pretty cool.

-Fundamental Theorem of Algebra
How trivial it becomes with the machinery of complex analysis/algebraic topology.

-Brouwer's Fixed Point Theorem
Pretty nice result.

-The existence of irrational a,b such that a^b is rational.
The nonconstructive proof of this by considering root(2)^root(2) is pretty devious.

-Fermat's method of infinite descent
One of my favourite examples of proof by contradiction.

That's it for now, but it is a pretty arbitrary selection of nice results.
 

nerdasdasd

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What thing in Maths gave you the equivalent of a 'nerdgasm'? Doesn't have to be something complex (no pun intended), even a fairly trivial but cool result would be alright.
Learning the gradient formula , (opposed to counting) lols.
 

Nooblet94

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I cried when I realised I finally understood calculus.

I was over at a friends place last night and he showed me some cool stuff to do with pascal's triangle. For example, if you write it out and then circle all the odd numbers, the pattern created is Sierpinski's triangle. If you read the numbers in each row - with multiple digit numbers you carry the leftmost digits over to the other columns - as a single number, it lists the powers of 11 (although that's just an observation, he hasn't actually got around to proving it yet).
 

math man

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I really like Euler's product formula for riemann zeta function as it gives a relation between an infinite sum of numbers involving rational numbers expressed
as a product involving all prime numbers, which i believe is pretty amazing.
 

Shadowdude

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Cauchy Integral Function



dat fudge factor that pops up everywhere
 

Leffife

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These two symbols: ∑ and ∫

Man, like seriously. Both of them look sexy.
 

RealiseNothing

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I cried when I realised I finally understood calculus.

I was over at a friends place last night and he showed me some cool stuff to do with pascal's triangle. For example, if you write it out and then circle all the odd numbers, the pattern created is Sierpinski's triangle. If you read the numbers in each row - with multiple digit numbers you carry the leftmost digits over to the other columns - as a single number, it lists the powers of 11 (although that's just an observation, he hasn't actually got around to proving it yet).
That's actually really easy to prove. The powers of 11 work on basically the same principle as Pascal's triangle, hence why it turns out that way.
 

Trebla

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The infinite series of rational numbers which had nice patterns and converged to nice irrational numbers (which I didn't expect at all when I first encountered them)





 
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