| 词条 | Interesting number paradox | ||||||||||||||||
| 释义 |
The interesting number paradox is a semi-humorous paradox which arises from the attempt to classify every natural number as either "interesting" or "dull" (or "boring" or "uninteresting"). The paradox states that every natural number is interesting. The "proof" is by contradiction: if there exists a non-empty set of uninteresting natural numbers, there would be a smallest uninteresting number – but the smallest uninteresting number is itself interesting because it is the smallest uninteresting number, thus producing a contradiction. The number 1729 has been called a taxicab number, because in a discussion between the mathematicians G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan about interesting and dull numbers, the former remarked that the number 1729 of the taxicab he had ridden seemed uninteresting, and the latter immediately answered that it is interesting, being the smallest number that is the sum of two cubes in two different ways. Paradoxical natureAttempting to classify all numbers this way leads to a paradox or an antinomy of definition. Any hypothetical partition of natural numbers into interesting and dull sets seems to fail. Since the definition of interesting is usually a subjective, intuitive notion of "interesting", it should be understood as a half-humorous application of self-reference in order to obtain a paradox. The paradox is alleviated if "interesting" is instead defined objectively: for example, the smallest integer that does not appear in an entry of the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences was originally found to be 11630 on 12 June 2009.[1] The number fitting this definition later became 12407 from November 2009 until at least November 2011, then 13794 as of April 2012, until it appeared in sequence {{OEIS2C|id=A218631}} as of 3 November 2012. Since November 2013, that number was 14228, at least until 14 April 2014.[1] (This definition of uninteresting is possible only because the OEIS lists only a finite number of terms for each entry. For instance, {{OEIS2C|id=A000027}} is the sequence of all natural numbers, and if continued indefinitely would contain all positive integers. As it is, the sequence is recorded in its entry only as far as 77.) Depending on the sources used for the list of interesting numbers, a variety of other numbers can be characterized as uninteresting in the same way.[2] However, as there are many significant results in mathematics that make use of self-reference (such as Gödel's incompleteness theorems), the paradox illustrates some of the power of self-reference, and thus touches on serious issues in many fields of study.{{citation needed|date=December 2014}} The mathematician and philosopher Alex Bellos suggested in 2014 that a candidate for the lowest boring number would be 247 because it was, at the time, "the lowest number not to have its own page on Wikipedia".[3]
See also
Further reading
References1. ^1 {{cite web|url=http://www.nathanieljohnston.com/2009/06/11630-is-the-first-uninteresting-number/|title=11630 is the First Uninteresting Number|author=Johnston, N.|date=June 12, 2009|accessdate=November 12, 2011}} 2. ^{{cite web|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180612143635/http://math.crg4.com/uninteresting.html|title=Uninteresting Numbers|author=Charles R Greathouse IV|accessdate=2011-08-28}} 3. ^{{cite book|last=Bellos|first=Alex|others=illus. The Surreal McCoy|date=June 2014|title=The Grapes of Math: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life|edition=1st Simon & Schuster hardcover|publisher=Simon & Schuster|publication-place=N.Y.|at=pp. 238 & 319 (quoting p. 319)|isbn=978-1-4516-4009-0}} External links
3 : Mathematics paradoxes|Mathematical humor|Articles containing proofs |
||||||||||||||||
| 随便看 |
|
开放百科全书收录14589846条英语、德语、日语等多语种百科知识，基本涵盖了大多数领域的百科知识，是一部内容自由、开放的电子版国际百科全书。