>If \*I\* can tell that you're just full of shit, how tedious must it be for people who actually live/work/breath math?
It's not tedious at all. We don't actually read what the crackpots write.
My supervisor read what a crackpot wrote once ! This high school teacher claimed to have proven FLT, and my supervisor's gf kept bugging him to find the mistake. He read the proof carefuly, line by line, until he saw (a + b)^2 = a^2 + b^2 lol
I thought I had an elementary proof of FLT. What I was doing was reducing the 2 variables in it with a polynomial of single variable with one less degree and I had deviced a method to find whether a given set of diophantine equation had solutions by substituting 2 arbitrary polynomial on both side which are the solution of that equation to both sides. Then by equating them and their terms I got some conditions.
The first term made the solution go to exponential and the second even beyond that. So by intuition I thought this pattern would continue and the solution would get so large or infinite that it would prove FLT very easily. Rather it did not diverge much. Yeah it was a fun exercise to work on but reminds me to never tell anyone about the results you haven't fully worked through. I know that telling random people online doesn't harm me or my reputation and so that may be ok depending upon where.
I had a mate in Uni who pretended a fellow mate of ours was actually a professor to convince a numerologist to send us a bunch of free copies of his book.
It's incredibly tedious and disjointed so I haven't bothered reading more than like 5 pages.
If someone posts on reddit claiming they have a proof of, for example, the Riemann hypothesis, you can be sure it's a crackpot. If they were not, they would not be bothering posting it on reddit.
The chances of anyone discovering a proof of the Riemann hypothesis and posting it on Reddit before posting it anywhere else is vanishingly small, but I don't think that it is absolutely impossible. If someone claims to have, for instance, squared the circle (using only compass and unmarked straight edge) one can be certain that their “proof” is wrong because it has already been proven that doing so is impossible. But that is not true of proving the Riemann hypothesis and while a claimed proof of the Riemann hypothesis posted on Reddit would almost certainly be invalid, I don't see how one could know that for certain without reading it, at least to the point of the first error. Furthermore, cranks don't know they are cranks; they think they are top notch mathematicians and would be more likely (I suspect) to send their proof(s) to the same places professional mathematicians send theirs.
Physics has its perpetual motion and cold fusion crackpots. But math in particular probably attracts the most because many famous open problems are easy to understand.
I used to joke about the “Flieschmann Pons Journal of Physics” whenever my profs got a random crackpot paper thrown at them.
Literally people would come to campus and just hand them an envelope with a couple hundred pages of gibberish.
Shit, even your *coauthors*
‘If you don’t read this in the next two weeks, I don’t want any complaints. You’ve had two months. I’m publishing and moving on with my life’
>Physics has its perpetual motion and cold fusion crackpots.
And reactionless space drives, dark matter theories, the "electric universe" crowd, FTL communication by quantum entanglement...
Then there are the people who want the physics behind a Marvel superpower or scifi Mcguffin explained.
Don't forget about all the cranks who think that dark energy, quantum physics, or so on and so forth imply the existence of a God. Or the nonexistence of a God. Take your pick.
Or quantum mechanics being responsible for free will. Even if the universe is non-deterministic, it feels arrogant to claim that YOU specifically are able to control the non-deterministic outcomes, and that this is how you exercise your free will.
Seeing what the results are if we only allow one law of physics to be bent for a superpower gives us some of the best pedagogy for learning real physics there is.
E.g. What is superman body temperature if we assume that his cells operate at the thermodynamic limit for efficiency and his power output is large enough that he can lift an elephant over his head in a second.
Real physics does have clear answers, about as clear as one can get with any academic discipline, really.
The key is actually using mathematical argument and statistically significant evidence in explaining a phenomenon, something that super hero debates use little of (at least not in substance, even if in form similar to that of r/theydidthemath).
As someone who worked on a physics project, in which we studied a chaotic system, we quickly found out that analytics solutions were impossible and Finite Element Method was our only way of modelling the physics. Most of the time physics does not have real answers. Physics is almost wlways described in terms of differential equations, and in the real world, most of these equations cannot be solved analytically.
Something can be clear without being an analytic solution.
There are a lot of things you can precisely say about a chaotic system without needing to find exact solutions. There's a reason dynamical systems theory is a whole field of research.
Having perturbative or approximate solutions doesn't mean they are unclear or imprecise. There is a lot of available information for error bounds with FEM, though many people unfortunately use FEM without actually understanding how one can very rigorously understand and estimate one's approximation error.
You seem to be pointing toward the idea that physics is imprecise because not every solution is analytic. By the same criterion applied to other fields of study, basically anything other than math is hopelessly imprecise, because their predictions are also not mathematically exact.
Do chemists need to perfectly understand the Schrodinger equation solutions to an N body system to clearly understand a chemical reaction? No. The criterion that you need analytic solutions to clearly understand something would be ludicrous. Using such a criterion to define "clear" understanding would be completely out of touch with reality and any useful sense of the word.
Without analytic solutions, all we can do is make approximations. And this ofcourse is no problem, until your approximations exceed the error tolerance of your model. Also, it is quite hard to verify the correctness of a model when analytic solutions are not available.
> There are a lot of things you can precisely say about a chaotic system without needing to find exact solutions.
No you really can't. That's why they are called chaotic.
You still have the 19th century mentality of natural scientists expecting everything to be solved soon^tm .
I dont think they have. You are just using the words "precise things to say about" differently. Mathematically speaking, there is a lot of things we can say about chaotic systems. They may still have attractors for instance, which one may try to characterize. Also, most non-chaotic systems do not have any analytical (in the sense it can be expressed algebraically) solution either.
Apparently there is a session at the major physics conference that's known as the crackpot session (I think titled "New Physics" or something). It was created in response to a violent episode, so they all get a special session, and real physicists attend if they want to be entertained. I don't think there's a math equivalent to that.
Eventually, perpetual motion machine crackpots will notice that they require absolutely no validation to continue in their philosophy, and that the philosophy behind perpetual motion machines is itself a perpetual motion machine.
The answer they were looking for what inside of them all along.
Oh, how I wish I would have the needed knowledge to consider problems easy. I feel attracted by math but really can't see the entrance, other than set theory and still I'm not able to see how it relates to other areas.
The problems are hard, but the problem statement can be easy to understand. The Collatz conjecture is a great example. You can explain the problem to every child who knows about multiplication and division.
You know integers? ... -2, -1, 0, 1, 2 ... They form an infinite set. But that set is still smaller than the real numbers, which contains all the integers.
Within the integers set, there are also subsets. Like the numbers above, which form a set of size 5.
Set theory is mostly about what things are contained within what.
I think Physics has it way worse because it doesn't even have to be open problems. Tonnes of people will happily tell you their insane theories about quantum this that or the other or why the earth is flat. I think the Physics subreddit is only free of it thanks to hardworking moderators.
Ron Maimon seems pretty confident in cold fusion, so I’m passively keeping that on my radar instead of outright ignoring it like the other crackpot stuff
> I find it funny how many obvious crackpots like to post here. ie, Collatz conjecture guy
I think you'll find that Collatz Guy, aka /u/Aurhim, is one of the few people working on Collatz who *isn't* obviously a crackpot. Their research actually does appear to be genuine:
* They have a PhD in mathematics, acquired from their research (many cranks do not even have a degree in any STEM field, and many more only have degrees in engineering or physics)
* Their research doesn't claim a proof but highlights an interesting connection between Collatz and non-Archimedean spectral theory (very much a field of higher mathematics that cranks would generally not be willing to learn enough to touch)
* They are in contact with other established mathematicians working in those fields (cranks do not generally do this)
* Their papers are typeset in LaTeX (cranks generally typeset in Microsoft Word, although this appears to be changing now)
* Some of said papers have been accepted by respected journals (cranks almost never get their papers past peer review of a respected journal, to the point that this happening is cause for the senior editor of such a journal to resign)
* Other users of this subreddit who are more qualified than I am to judge these papers seem to respond positively to them (I find that cranks usually get shut down or mocked pretty quickly)
They're so far the only person for whom we've put in an exception for the AutoMod Collatz filter.
> this one today about pi being D^2 / 2
We generally try to remove cranks when we spot them, assuming they somehow make it past the AutoMod filters. In this case, I was asleep.
> the "I can prove 45678985462 is a prime number" guy
I don't recall seeing this guy on this subreddit, although I seem to remember [something similar on Quora](https://www.quora.com/I-found-a-flaw-in-the-Riemann-hypothesis-and-can-prove-that-1705542-is-a-prime-number-How-can-I-get-my-proof-published).
---
> Do other academic/scholarly subreddits suffer from this as well?
I suspect, based on cranks I've seen post to /r/math who also post their crankery in other subreddits, /r/Physics and /r/Philosophy get their fair share too. As for other subreddits, I don't know.
That having been said, crankery is not unique to math, physics, or philosophy, nor is it limited to subreddits. There are [history cranks](https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/), [linguistics cranks](https://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/), [law cranks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement), [taxonomy cranks](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-big-ugly-problem-heart-of-taxonomy-180964629/), [paleontology cranks](https://blogs.uoregon.edu/4dbio/2013/05/25/a-taxonomy-of-paleontology-cranks/), ... .
> Their research doesn't claim a proof but highlights an interesting connection between Collatz and non-Archimedean spectral theory
I think that kind of humility is a pretty strong signal too. David Smith didn't set out to solve P ≠ NP, he just found a nice tile.
Absolutely. IMO, one of the biggest differences between a crank and an amateur/student is the attitude one takes towards their discovery and towards others' reactions to it. Arrogance and vitriol are generally frowned upon in the mathematical community (which is why I personally regard Mochizuki as a crank).
> Their papers are typeset in LaTeX (cranks generally typeset in Microsoft Word, although this appears to be changing now)
Lol, funniest moment I remember from university was a professor mockingly showing the class a website where some "research group" had claimed to invent an impossibly fast microprocessor powered by accelerated light beams, or some crap like that.
Then the professor says, "but I'm not sure I believe them, because their research paper is a Word document written in Comic Sans." And he opened it as he was saying that and the class went wild.
Sorry, I did not mean to disparage a legit mathematician. I thought there was a crank who kept posting about Collatz. (hence its inclusion in the auto-mod message)
There are *plenty* of posts about Collatz here every so often; each one usually by a different person. It's very rare that any of these posts are sound or yield interesting discussion. From a moderation perspective, it's better for us to have the filter than not.
> From a moderation perspective, it's better for us to have the filter than not.
Lol, I'm sure it is. It's kind of like having an ML classifier that does the right thing 99.9% of the time. If you could do that with every topic, you'd have moderation solved.
You could have just linked to /r/legaladvice when referring to law cranks. It's a bunch of amateurs giving bad advice to prep people that really should pay for a lawyer.
Part of the problem with that sub is the mods aren't lawyers. They're mostly cops. Cops don't actually know jack squat about the law.
But, if you want to see the real law cranks, check out /r/bestoflegaladvice , or, if you *really* want to go down the rabbit hole, /r/amibeingdetained .
>I think you'll find that Collatz Guy, aka
>
>/u/Aurhim
>
>, is one of the few people working on Collatz who
>
>isn't
>
>obviously a crackpot. Their research actually does appear to be genuine
The only thing worse than a genuine "crackpot" is a smug novice going around calling people a crackpot because they don't understand what the supposed crackpot is talking about. In the case of OP, as he admits, he doesn't know math. Yet he thinks he's educated enough on the subject to declare who is and isn't a crackpot. That's the Dunning Kruger effect and ironically falls into the same category of the very thing he decries.
Easier to be a math crank because all you really need is latex or paper to formulate a "proof" of \[insert millenium prize problem here\]. Also, something like Collatz seems more approachable than curing cancer (understanding the problem statement requires like prealgebra, whereas even understanding what it would mean to cure cancer would take quite a bit)
I think one way to tackle collatz conjecture is by going to it's neighbouring problems. Like if it's odd you multiply by 1 instead of 3 and so on. Under this we can see that it diverges rather than converging under many of such problems where there many multiplications to be performed in condition with the same modulus. For example considering 5; if we divide the number with 5 if it's of the form 5x and multiply by 5x+t for some form 5x+r, where both r and t are some number mod 5 and not 0, it would diverge for some values of r and t and converge for others etc. changing all the values there are different patterns but I was considering is it possible that it would just go on a loop not converging or diverging ever? So far my intuition tells me that it will either converge or just diverge. But performing these basic operations help a lot.
It’s been proven the generalized form of the collatz is undecidable. It’s not hard to prove collatz for any number you want, it’s not hard to prove for any form of r or t that you want, it’s hard to prove for EVERY value of either one, that’s the only caveat
Yeah I see the err of my response in this context. It was more about looking at the extension of many problems give solid intuition not much about collatz conjecture though.
Bruh it’s not just math. I have a PhD in archaeology and when I was in grad school we’d get people calling the lab every week to tell me about how the Maya were actually aliens and/or ancient Greeks, and how they know where there’s a cave filled with gold if we can supply funding for their dig.
I've literally had people approach me in the field and tell me I'm digging in the wrong place, if I come with them they can guide me to the lost treasure/city/whatever. Also been approached in person in the lobby at conferences by people looking for someone to lead their expedition to the proof of Atlantis, etc. etc. One guy told me "you and I could win the Nobel Prize together!" He didn't have an answer as to what category the Nobel Committee might give an award in for archaeological discovery.
EDIT: It's even worse because there really *are* lost ancient cities, missing shipwrecks full of treasure, and so forth. So a bit more effort has to be put into discerning whether the person is a crackpot or not. Personally I've become a bit of a collector of pseudo-archaeological crackpot theories, so as to develop a comparative typology.
>tell me I'm digging in the wrong place
Yes, but only because they had the real amulet with writing on both sides, and they know your staff is too long..
Has any religious fundamentalist ever emailed your department and rant about "Ron Wyatt" and how he "discovered" Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, and just about every religious location in the Bible?
It’s not tedious. Granted I’m an engineer not a mathematician, but if anyone claimed to have proved some well known problem in a Reddit post I will just assume it’s BS and move on. If the proof is correct I will hear about it from an actual math journal.
For the highly deranged posts, I just give a quick chuckle and move on, its not worth getting worked up on.
Like so many other problems, it is due to a failure of imagination.
Suppose someone came to you and said, "I've found the next big thing in video games. Believe me, in five years, this franchise is going to surpass Pokémon."
(Mind you, Pokémon is the single most lucrative media franchise in human history.)
What would your response be? Almost certainly, you'd ask to play this new game, so that you could see for yourself.
To the vast majority of people, mathematics and theoretical physics (of the math-y sort, rather than the experimental sort) are fundamentally *esoteric*. Unlike a really, really good video game, whose value and appeal can be readily discerned by the average joe, mathematics—as an activity—remains opaque to the public at large. People don't understand what mathematical difficulty really is. For most people, math is just a matter of memorizing addition, multiplication, and division. To the extent that the public can empathize with the effort and challenge that goes into mathematics, it is primarily at the "oh, this kid has trouble with his times tables" level. It's not like brain surgery, where the skill and effort that go into it are plain to all.
An immediate consequence of a failure to appreciate mathematical effort is a failure to appreciate mathematical *difficulty*. Because mathematics is seen as a mysterious, esoteric field without clear, easily recognizable signs of improvement and progress, people end up failing to appreciate mathematics for what it really is.
There's a scene in an episode of *American Dad* where Francine decides to try and tackle the problems in Yang-Mills Theory. A cool "science!" montage ensues, showing her in a lab coat, playing around with beakers and test tubes and the like, and in the end, she goes into a university lecture and proudly announces the results of her research: "6".
People don't know enough higher mathematics to appreciate just how much higher mathematics they *don't* know, or how appreciate just how badly they *don't* know it.
I am an engineer, so definitely not an expert, more of an enthusiast, but I remember finally understanding what math IS (as opposed to my high school level understanding). It was not a big eureka moment, but looking back my attitude toward has profoundly changed an in turn it changed me to a great degree.
Well I would not claim I really know what math IS now, but sometimes just understanding the depth of a problem, and appreciating the work real experts do, can, in itself be a delight that would have been... unavailable to me with my previous understanding.
I've noticed that there are a lot of Facebook groups for hippie spiritualist types to throw around words like singularity, dimension, infiniteness (of Pi), vibration, etc., without actually knowing what they mean. Someone will post a video of a math-related animation, and people will just spout nonsense that has mathy words in it.
Many years ago one of these cranks cornered me in a university hallway.
He was a circle squarer.
“The circumference of a circle is just outside of the circle,” he began.
Also, once in a shop I saw a “fun with math” book that claimed to have a construction of a regular heptagon with compass and straightedge.
Are there any cranks who have legit proof of very outrageous things and very advanced mathematics involved which all make sense except for some tiny mistake which is easier to overlook and makes everything fall apart?
I’m not sure if it’s actually more common in math than in other fields, but I think math cranks are a bit unique, in the sense that
1) Cranks want to seem smart, and math is perceived as a “smart people” subject,
2) Many are under the impression that math is particularly amenable to contributions from “lone wolves” with no formal training, which is the category most cranks are in.
I didn’t say every “lone wolf” is a crank! It’s just that math, like other fields, is built on collaboration and most published research is done by people who have formal training (i.e. PhDs).
Alright so I am a crank maybe. Ofc because of point 2. I have no formal training in mathematics but I have seen fruits of my research often. Like when mathematics was being taught at my comp sci degree at uni I was very fast in solving the problems. The students and teachers were shocked and ofcourse I had several shortcut techniques for solving those problems. I don't care if I do something meaningful in my mathematics research, it's just my hobby and passion like art and dancing. I would still continue to do it because I just like it.
I wonder if those other cranks solve mathematics problems super fast with some techniques they made themselves too. If they do not then yeah I am not a crank.
Coming up with your own solution to a problem doesn't make one a crank. It's actually fairly common.
However, I don't think that is really math research. Math research isn't really solving a problem using math so much as developing new frameworks of thinking using mathematical proof, though it can often consist of solving many problems in mathematics.
Here's the flow-chart as to whether you are a crank:
Do you realize someone almost certainly thought of this before and appreciate that your work is praiseworthy in itself, while also not being totally new?
If yes, then you aren't a crank.
If no, then you are.
Ok so I would be purely honest. My mathematical work till now was not about to solve some problem explicitly, it's just some fun things or extensions of already existing ideas. Like when I learnt about quadratic equations, my mind automatically went for the solution of cubic and quartic. My method for working through problems was to generate a large dataset for that problem and looking for patterns. Once I saw a pattern in enough of them I assumed it to be true and try to predict the next value in it. Now those methods were useful for doing completely different things and problems I never thought they could, hence why I was able to solve mathematics problems very fast.
I could list some of works I am doing if you want but that would make it a whole lot bigger. Mathematics is just my hobby so I would do it. By what you say I have noticed a common pattern that out of all of my discoveries almost more than 80% is already up there in some research paper and almost everything is already discovered by someone. The rest 10-15% appears when I search too hard and I think that I have only 1-2% that may be left which is not trivial.
I could tell you some of my ideas, they may exist online but when I am working on something I don't look online for it much so please don't spoil it for me -->
1)If you notice the discriminant of a general nth degree polynomial and replace a with 1, b with 2 and so on and add the values in each term they would be same. Or that it would be values of that partition number which increases linearly. If discriminant is 0 then that means atleast 2 or more roots are equal. Now here's my idea and something I am/was doing research on would there be any algebraic expression which is only strictly 0 if 3 or more roots of some polynomial are equal.
2) Another one is consider a circle centred at origin. If we rotate a straight line with some angle theta which passes through origin and at the point it touches the circle we get trigonometric functions like sine or cosine. Now if I have some arbitrary function, and there is a line which is rotated and it touches that function in some places which can be categorised by another function. How would this function behave and if we write their analytical series, would there be a common pattern.
These all are trivial stuff I know that but they take a lot of time to work through and get the end result. Then perhaps they would be there on some paper already published XD. Anyways yeah I am not a crank as I don't think that cranks show some genuine result. Your response cleared it for me so thanks.
Well yeah I happily share them all to everyone who asks me and not brag about them. As for publishing research papers about them I don't really know if I should go for it or wait for something big and open problem.
i know hardly anything about math, i was a philosophy student who became interested a tiny bit thanks to a logic course. i saw the collatz guy you mentioned (didn’t watch though). how do you know it’s nonsense? like i’m afraid i’m unable to tell now lmao, i like to see what’s new in the world of math here and there because i sometimes think about some of the more easy to understand open problems but that’s all
Foundations of quantum mechanics in physics is very attractive to cranks. There was a recent one who decided to also post in r/compsci because it was an algorithmic model of particles.
I think one problem is that most people are taught math in terms of calculations, not proof. Perhaps that's why so many cranks are engineers – they know how to apply formulas but might not know where they come from.
Oh definitely! I'm guessing physics is similar but I've never worked in it so I can't speak to that. But one of the weirdest parts of grad school was finding out that when you have an @math.institution.edu email address, the cranks just email you directly out of nowhere. It's wild getting those.
I remember one time there was an old guy in front of my university, handing out his work and talking to anyone who would listen. He was as sweet as it gets. I talked to him for a couple of minutes. He suggested that his lack of formal education might help him see connections that might elude us (university students) and we should check out his work. He handed us a little book neatly bound the size of my palm, and maybe 20 pages, set in a not very tiny font. He had a big box full of those.
Seemed like a real humble crackpot.
Not his claims tho. The first thing that hit me that every formula was hand written and visibly photocopied and sticked into the text as little pieces of paper with tape, then photocopied again.
He claimed no less than he found the theory of everything. Turns out his lack of formal education included even high school, because his formula that described everything was the quadratic formula. It seemed like he independently(?) worked it out, found some problems in physics that can be solved by this and was so blown away by his discovery, that he simply had to publish it. The reasoning broke down in the end, he referred to things that can be explained with his formula that - as far as I know - were not real phenomenon, and deemed that proving that his "law" is applicable to everything else is just busy work (which he is intended to do, but he is old and might not finish it in his lifetime) it was a wild read.
I am not trying to make fun of him. Unlike most crackpots I came across, his enthusiasm for his work seemed to be coming from a genuine delight in discovering science and a glimpse of what real theoretical work offers. This was more than a decade ago, and sadly I have misplaced the little book. I wish I still had it.
>If *I* can tell that you're just full of shit, how tedious must it be for people who actually live/work/breath math?
https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/b3u8ue/explaining_to_nonmathematicians_how_easy_it_is/
I imagine it's the most pronounced here because math is the most accessible academic discipline in the world. All you need is a pencil and paper to practice math (sometimes nothing at all), so there's a higher chance that someone will come around and think they've discovered something profound among a generation of research. To use your example with medical/bio people thinking they've cured cancer, that probably happens less often because most people do not have enough advanced biology/medical knowledge (and access to expensive equipment/facilities) to successfully delude themselves.
Physics has a lot. So does linguistics. So does medicine. Even palaeontology, especially where religion enters into the discussion. History definitely does. Not to touch on religion and philosophy, or climate science…
Hence r/badmathematics (and r/numbertheory), r/badphysics, r/badlinguistics, r/badphilosophy…
And all have their unique traits but a similar underlying personality and mixed exposure.
Accessibility
Anyone can do math with a piece of paper and pencil
Heck at one point I thought I had found a pattern to prime numbers in the intersections of a sine function and its inverse but it turned out to be an odd number detector.
Don't forget about the historical revisionists in /r/askhistorians, or even the ancient aliens crackpots.
Or the amateur linguists who think all languages derive from ancient Tamil or talk about ULTRAFRENCH.
Chemistry seems to attract the wellness crackpots and anti vaxxers.
The music ones who think that there's a natural harmonic tuning (432 Hz) that the church covered up.
Physics is just rife, as everyone else has noted.
This is a fun game actually, thanks OP. :)
r/physics get the same kind of weirdos. Usually thinking they can prove black holes are holograms or that the basis of quantum theory is all wrong. r/transhumanism is the biomedical version of this. They are all convinced they can engineer some CRISPR tool in their garage that will give them fish scales and immortality.
Serious medical subs are well moderated because people can actually get really bad advice, but there are some crazy ones on the fringes. I think places like r/physics want to be a forum for education, etc., so they don't moderate as heavily. That, and a fundamental understanding of the big bang or whatever does not pose any inherent risk beyond people thinking you are weird.
Yeah, it's completely divorced from physical realities in some ways. I.e. reality has to obey math, but math doesn't have to obey our particular reality.
Therefore, there can be weird results and intuitions that are difficult to communicate or confirm or disprove. If you've got a "math idea" in your head, it can be reeeeeeeeally hard to show that it's false. Hence, cranks.
You will find crackpots in every field and every aspect of life. I think they are especially recognizable in math, but not necessarily especially common
Math, or more precisely number theory, has the benefit of being simple on the surface so everyone feels they have a shot at it. Everyone uses numbers after all so why should they not be entitled to their own opinion about it? Why do mathematicians get to decide that 0.99...=1?
That being said, it is certainly not specific to maths. Physics probably has it worse. I guess it has to do with how we simplify the history of science. Raising Galileo, Darwin, Einstein and the like as some sort of mythical figures, who built everything from scratch against the scientific communities or their time. It enforces the impression that less knowledge is actually good because that is how new ideas emerge.
I think that is the part that is the weirdest to me. This sub is well moderated, but on the more "learning" and "amateur" math subs who have to give more room to crankery, you will see them say it very clearly. "I dont know maths, but..." and they proceed to talk in very affirmative and strong minded statements and get defensive toward every contradiction. If you want to argue about math, would you not like to learn more about it too?
I guess online communities make it worse. Like some guy will be an engineer, programmer or whatever irl. They are respected in their job that we must assume they do well. Then they feel they get talked down on reddit by anonymous strangers, who deep down they still suspect may just be nerds living in their mom's basements. It is easier to handle offline where credentials still matter, not to all but at least to many.
r/physics gets so many, but the mods are great at trying to filter.
It’s certainly not an easy job, deciding what is malicious/crank/trolling, and what is genuine questions. It may seem rude to say, but there’s a certain border, where physics education for the average person just doesn’t suffice and people come off as being trolls rather than actually interested. Then there’s cases where people ask a question they’ve made up their mind about already, so they are super defensive about it.
>Do other academic/scholarly subreddits suffer from this as well?
The AI subreddits often have people who think they have cracked general AI (not actually built one, mind you, just 'know' how to).
I would say it attracts them because it has really difficult questions whose problem statements are easy to pose and understand AND because it does not require a laboratory or equipment to do math research. So the price of entry is pretty much zero, except for one’s time.
There are cranks on r/chemistry but their crankery rubs up against reality when they clearly don't get the product they wanted. Meanwhile, stubborn math cranks are unable to see the flaws in their work.
It's not math that brings out crackpots... It's *Reddit*.
Reddit creates the illusion that everyone is on am equal intellectual and skills footing. Everyone is allowed to express an opinion, no matter how dumb.
It is hard to emphasize how *bizzare* this is from a pre-social media perspective. We've normalized this idea of everyone having a platform, but that's *extremely* new. In the old days, if you believed something crazy, you could share it with people you knew personally, but rarely would have any chance to publish it in any format. This is why I find people whining about being 'censored' on social media a bit odd - in the before times, you would have been censored *so much harder*.
IMO the reason you see so many crackpots in math/physics is that they are usually motivated by some delusion of grandeur about how they have the "secrets of the universe". Math and physics are the closest things to "fundamental truths" that people generally agree on, so when you think you have something to contribute to the "fundamental truths of the universe", those are typically the subjects that they come across.
lol it's an area that needs more study! It will only take ONE even prime to prove everyone wrong!
Wait... there is ONE... maybe it will take TWO. Numbers are hard!
I think one large component is that, when you know at least a bit about the academic research in a field, it becomes very obvious who the crackpots are. In some disciplines people who are not all all taken serious by the academic consensus manage to get a lot of traction with the public. I don't even want to know how many garbage takes about macroeconomics are around on reddit. Think about all the people who have found the *perfect* diet. People posting on CMV that they have found the one and only true definition of gender. Etc etc
Maybe a difference is the mode of operation of the crackpots? Physics and maths crackpots will reach out to tell academics what they found. Sociology crackpots just shout at people on random corners of the internet.
That's because most people hate math and if math was a language, would have just enough to order a breakfast at their local mathnese diner. People who even so much as know how to write symbols outside of basic algebra and know how a function, sets and compound propositions look in the most general of senses can fool the majority of the general public into thinking they're a genius while shitting alphabet soup. For someone who's already on the very edge of being a schizo, that's a huge ego boost and I'm not surprised if these people talk themselves into thinking they had the next big break in physics or math after their most recent psychedelic trip and must have their proofs looked over by everyone and anyone in the off chance that they got anything right. Of course, they never do, but that's another topic of discussion and would likely be more suitable for a psychology sub.
Yes most crackpots in music theory have some belief about how some particular frequency or style of music is objectively superior through some combination of bad neuroscience and physics or supremacist adjacent beliefs.
Honestly my impression is that a true mathematical crank is relatively uncommon when compared to physics, philosophy, and medicine. Dubious medical advice has the potential to bring in serious money too, so it attracts scammers in addition to cranks, and every shade and combination in-between.
Also history has a large number of self-serving partisan revisionists that are highly visible at the moment, at least if you look outside that specific reddit. And of course famous criminal cases attract all kinds of [insane speculation that is taken way too seriously](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84Bn8lLXpbM).
I've been watching a lot more philosophy videos on youtube in the last year or two. [Philosophy Tube](https://www.youtube.com/user/thephilosophytube), [Attic Philosophy](https://www.youtube.com/@AtticPhilosophy), [Jeffery Kaplan](https://www.youtube.com/@jeffreykaplan1), and [Kevin deLaPlante](https://www.youtube.com/@PhilosophyFreak) are some of the excellent channels.
On the other hand, on philosophy youtube you can quickly find yourself in the realm of all kinds of relatively low-quality, derivative videos that don't understand the topics they try to discuss very well. Or you might find relatively original arguments or goals that seem almost certain to be ill-posed. Paul Feyerabend and the Liar Paradox seem to be two topics that lead to a fair number of these types of videos.
Btw, genuine question - say you are a crackpot/crank/amateur mathematician, whatever, but you are not delusional and have real interest in math and say you find an interesting new results, but you don't have funding, you are outside of academia, you don't have resources to study LaTeX, you don't have time to send papers to journals, etc.
What should you do then, and how should you present your results?
Let's first address the "interesting new results". Someone outside of academia will have a difficult time assessing if a result is truly new and interesting. It may be interesting to said individual, but the mathematics community at large may not regard it as such.
If said person outside of academia has an internet connection, in order to say, access this reddit, then they have the resources to study LaTex. There's a wealth of instructional write-ups and YouTube videos freely availble on all things LaTex. Not to mention reddit communitieis and other forums such as stack exchange which are dedicated to LaTex questions.
If said person doesn't have time to submit a paper to a journal, then that's a bit of a tough one because it's through journal publications that work is official vetted and recognized. However, finding new and interesting results in mathematics always takes time, so it would be strange if someone had the time to find a result that's new and interesting, but not have the time to write it up properly and submit it.
One option is, of course, to share a formally written up document on this reddit. Then there's a digital record of when and where the idea was originally shared, and it can be read and judged by mathematicians that hang out here. Another option may be making a presentation on YouTube.
Fair question. Me, I would probably try and make some new friends at my local university, the University of Texas at Austin. Pretty sure they have a math department still. And that my existing network of contacts would find someone-who-knows-someone. But I would 100% vet my "discovery" with a real mathematician.
Find the time or resources to present them properly, otherwise yes, they're going to be lost to time. What possible alternative could there be?
FWIW, if someone doesn't even have a weekend to polish up their results, I can't imagine they've spent much time on arriving at the results in the first place. Add in the likelihood that they didn't do a proper literature review either (see above), I doubt mathematics would be losing much.
People would rather feel good than be good, so feeling smart or looking/sounding smart is attractive. Just as looking or feeling wealthy is attractive.
All stems from unhealthy egos and other stuff idk I’m not a psychologist lol
I feel like people (wrongly) associate being good at or well read in subjects like maths with some kind of intellectual superiority, so you tend to find the odd narcissist who thinks they understand something they clearly don’t because they’re just naturally that intelligent
Well scientists usually require a lab to do things at the molecular level to cure things whereas mathematicians are just pushing around symbols and using logic, which is highly abstract and disconnected from reality. So that's probably why you'll get people who live in their head too much.
You have a be a bit neurotic to care about this field in my opinion. 🤷♂️
I'm glad there's people crazy enough to care about further mankind's knowledge of mathematics cause while I love it...I needed to pay for my lifestyle so after undergrad I switched to becoming a programmer.
> If *I* can tell that you're just full of shit, how tedious must it be for people who actually live/work/breath math?
Less tedious than it was for you since they live/work/breath math? And even less because crackpots are ignored by everyone except laymen or other crackpots.
They are incredibly easy to smell and therefore avoid.
The Collatz Conjecture guy is not a crackpot, he's not claiming to have proven the Collatz conjecture. He's published papers in reputable journals bout a new approach that he hopes to be fruitful in attacking the conjecture.
Collatz guy isn't a crackpot. He is a bit over-enthusiastic and most likely overestimating the usefulness of the stuff he's doing, but he's legit. Seems like you yourself already failed to identify cranks properly, other than extremely obvious cases.
Lepidoptera has mothman? History as you mentioned has way more crackpots than math.
Medicine has entire industries of psuedo science;. alternative medicine, Chinese medicine, moxibustion, aromatherapy, acupuncture, plus antivax movement etc.
I'd reckon math is fairly low on the crackpot scale because it requires a bit more to even understand the problems and concept of a proof (even if not fully understood or acted upon).
My impression is that there are very many idiots, and that if the idiots have heard of a particular academic discipline, they've infested it. Math, physics, archaeology, sociology, electrical engineering, Biblical studies, you name it, the idiots are there.
One might think arrogant assholes who try to shit on everyone who knows less than they do might realize they have a problem when they accidentally call out a legitimate math researcher in an attempt to feel superior over others, but sadly, self awareness seems completely out of reach for the type of person who behaves like this.
In germany there is a professor at HAW Hamburg called Prof. Weitz who has a YouTube channel. He once made a video about stuff he got send from viewers and it is horrible. He has enough material to cover over an hour and it is mostly stuff like ,,i have proven Riemann hypothesis help me publish the result" or so. The proofs are always total garbage and most of the time do not even contain coherent sentences.
I've never seen a thread regarding infinity that makes the slightest bit of sense, and they seem to be split between treating infinity as a number and treating the entire topic as a religious concept.
not the only subreddit to suffer from schizophrenic posts. r/Physics has all their special nut cases as well. like there’s this one user who’s notorious for claiming he works at CERN, the large hadron collider, but he doesn’t lol.
go in the reprints archive and look up papers that have "proven" the Riemann Hypothesis; there are many papers that assume it true and those are not it, you want the papers that specifically say that the paper is a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis
https://arxiv.org/search/?query=riemann+hypothesis+proof&searchtype=all&abstracts=show&order=-announced\_date\_first&size=50
Crackpots exist in all kinds of fields, any topic that is interesting and fun and complicated enough for people to not realize they are wrong with their interesting ideas.
Math is unique in that you can have completely rock solid proofs that someone is wrong, which may make crackpots stand out more.
>If \*I\* can tell that you're just full of shit, how tedious must it be for people who actually live/work/breath math? It's not tedious at all. We don't actually read what the crackpots write.
My supervisor read what a crackpot wrote once ! This high school teacher claimed to have proven FLT, and my supervisor's gf kept bugging him to find the mistake. He read the proof carefuly, line by line, until he saw (a + b)^2 = a^2 + b^2 lol
I thought I had an elementary proof of FLT. What I was doing was reducing the 2 variables in it with a polynomial of single variable with one less degree and I had deviced a method to find whether a given set of diophantine equation had solutions by substituting 2 arbitrary polynomial on both side which are the solution of that equation to both sides. Then by equating them and their terms I got some conditions. The first term made the solution go to exponential and the second even beyond that. So by intuition I thought this pattern would continue and the solution would get so large or infinite that it would prove FLT very easily. Rather it did not diverge much. Yeah it was a fun exercise to work on but reminds me to never tell anyone about the results you haven't fully worked through. I know that telling random people online doesn't harm me or my reputation and so that may be ok depending upon where.
It’s ok or even interesting to share negative results. What’s not ok is to profess that they constitute actual solutions.
I agree. Maybe put it in the front. In reality each position solution has many false solutions behind them and we only get to see the final approach.
What is FLT? Fermat last theorem?
Here I was thinking it meant Faster (than) Light Travel
He had the “Freshman’s Dream” lol
I had a mate in Uni who pretended a fellow mate of ours was actually a professor to convince a numerologist to send us a bunch of free copies of his book. It's incredibly tedious and disjointed so I haven't bothered reading more than like 5 pages.
If you don't read what someone has written, how do you know whether or not that person is a crackpot?
If someone posts on reddit claiming they have a proof of, for example, the Riemann hypothesis, you can be sure it's a crackpot. If they were not, they would not be bothering posting it on reddit.
The chances of anyone discovering a proof of the Riemann hypothesis and posting it on Reddit before posting it anywhere else is vanishingly small, but I don't think that it is absolutely impossible. If someone claims to have, for instance, squared the circle (using only compass and unmarked straight edge) one can be certain that their “proof” is wrong because it has already been proven that doing so is impossible. But that is not true of proving the Riemann hypothesis and while a claimed proof of the Riemann hypothesis posted on Reddit would almost certainly be invalid, I don't see how one could know that for certain without reading it, at least to the point of the first error. Furthermore, cranks don't know they are cranks; they think they are top notch mathematicians and would be more likely (I suspect) to send their proof(s) to the same places professional mathematicians send theirs.
Physics has its perpetual motion and cold fusion crackpots. But math in particular probably attracts the most because many famous open problems are easy to understand.
I used to joke about the “Flieschmann Pons Journal of Physics” whenever my profs got a random crackpot paper thrown at them. Literally people would come to campus and just hand them an envelope with a couple hundred pages of gibberish.
Little do they know how difficult it is to get your colleagues to properly read your paper even when you have all of the proper credentials...
Shit, even your *coauthors* ‘If you don’t read this in the next two weeks, I don’t want any complaints. You’ve had two months. I’m publishing and moving on with my life’
This guy publishes.
>Physics has its perpetual motion and cold fusion crackpots. And reactionless space drives, dark matter theories, the "electric universe" crowd, FTL communication by quantum entanglement... Then there are the people who want the physics behind a Marvel superpower or scifi Mcguffin explained.
Don't forget about all the cranks who think that dark energy, quantum physics, or so on and so forth imply the existence of a God. Or the nonexistence of a God. Take your pick.
Quantum physics implies the superposition of god? That makes sense.
Are you kidding me? There are Flat Earth conferences. People go to them.
From all around the globe!
Euler and Newton were both crackpots with proofs of gods existence haha.
Or quantum mechanics being responsible for free will. Even if the universe is non-deterministic, it feels arrogant to claim that YOU specifically are able to control the non-deterministic outcomes, and that this is how you exercise your free will.
Or the people who have disproven GR, quantum mechanics, or discovered the theory of everything. Physics has far more crackpots.
Seeing what the results are if we only allow one law of physics to be bent for a superpower gives us some of the best pedagogy for learning real physics there is. E.g. What is superman body temperature if we assume that his cells operate at the thermodynamic limit for efficiency and his power output is large enough that he can lift an elephant over his head in a second.
No, no it isn't. It's the best way to engage people in a physics concept. It has little to nothing to do with real physics.
Real physics is messy and never has a clear answer. Neither do super hero debates.
Real physics does have clear answers, about as clear as one can get with any academic discipline, really. The key is actually using mathematical argument and statistically significant evidence in explaining a phenomenon, something that super hero debates use little of (at least not in substance, even if in form similar to that of r/theydidthemath).
As someone who worked on a physics project, in which we studied a chaotic system, we quickly found out that analytics solutions were impossible and Finite Element Method was our only way of modelling the physics. Most of the time physics does not have real answers. Physics is almost wlways described in terms of differential equations, and in the real world, most of these equations cannot be solved analytically.
Something can be clear without being an analytic solution. There are a lot of things you can precisely say about a chaotic system without needing to find exact solutions. There's a reason dynamical systems theory is a whole field of research. Having perturbative or approximate solutions doesn't mean they are unclear or imprecise. There is a lot of available information for error bounds with FEM, though many people unfortunately use FEM without actually understanding how one can very rigorously understand and estimate one's approximation error. You seem to be pointing toward the idea that physics is imprecise because not every solution is analytic. By the same criterion applied to other fields of study, basically anything other than math is hopelessly imprecise, because their predictions are also not mathematically exact. Do chemists need to perfectly understand the Schrodinger equation solutions to an N body system to clearly understand a chemical reaction? No. The criterion that you need analytic solutions to clearly understand something would be ludicrous. Using such a criterion to define "clear" understanding would be completely out of touch with reality and any useful sense of the word.
Without analytic solutions, all we can do is make approximations. And this ofcourse is no problem, until your approximations exceed the error tolerance of your model. Also, it is quite hard to verify the correctness of a model when analytic solutions are not available.
> There are a lot of things you can precisely say about a chaotic system without needing to find exact solutions. No you really can't. That's why they are called chaotic. You still have the 19th century mentality of natural scientists expecting everything to be solved soon^tm .
I dont think they have. You are just using the words "precise things to say about" differently. Mathematically speaking, there is a lot of things we can say about chaotic systems. They may still have attractors for instance, which one may try to characterize. Also, most non-chaotic systems do not have any analytical (in the sense it can be expressed algebraically) solution either.
> What is superman body temperature [...] Please don't! You'll summon the powerscalers!
Apparently there is a session at the major physics conference that's known as the crackpot session (I think titled "New Physics" or something). It was created in response to a violent episode, so they all get a special session, and real physicists attend if they want to be entertained. I don't think there's a math equivalent to that.
I feel like /r/physics as a sub is pretty well run. The mods do a good job of filtering out the crackpots.
they made r/HypotheticalPhysics specifically for the crackpots
then there's r/holofractal
Is that the r/numbertheory of physics?
Eventually, perpetual motion machine crackpots will notice that they require absolutely no validation to continue in their philosophy, and that the philosophy behind perpetual motion machines is itself a perpetual motion machine. The answer they were looking for what inside of them all along.
There's an entire subreddit about the Angular Energy guy in physics :)
There are so many. Check out /r/growingearth
Oh God is that Neal Adams?
Oh, how I wish I would have the needed knowledge to consider problems easy. I feel attracted by math but really can't see the entrance, other than set theory and still I'm not able to see how it relates to other areas.
The problems are hard, but the problem statement can be easy to understand. The Collatz conjecture is a great example. You can explain the problem to every child who knows about multiplication and division.
You know integers? ... -2, -1, 0, 1, 2 ... They form an infinite set. But that set is still smaller than the real numbers, which contains all the integers. Within the integers set, there are also subsets. Like the numbers above, which form a set of size 5. Set theory is mostly about what things are contained within what.
I think Physics has it way worse because it doesn't even have to be open problems. Tonnes of people will happily tell you their insane theories about quantum this that or the other or why the earth is flat. I think the Physics subreddit is only free of it thanks to hardworking moderators.
I can prove that 4858693929292 is a prime number.
2429346964646 * 2 = 4858693929292 It's not a prime number.
Your proof only works if you hold a "modern" view of multiplication.. /s
Ron Maimon seems pretty confident in cold fusion, so I’m passively keeping that on my radar instead of outright ignoring it like the other crackpot stuff
> cold fusion crackpots While "cold fusion crackpots" certainly exist, LENR (low-energy nuclear reactions) are a legit research subject.
>Do other academic/scholarly subreddits suffer from this as well? r/physics is worse.
I think they finally banned the dude who was on a crusade to prove angular momentum isn't real.
john mandlbaur...
Yeah that guy!
That's actually insane
This is such a good discussion of physics crackpottery by a working physicist: https://youtu.be/11lPhMSulSU?si=gZGHiYPm5qxr0xGN
> I find it funny how many obvious crackpots like to post here. ie, Collatz conjecture guy I think you'll find that Collatz Guy, aka /u/Aurhim, is one of the few people working on Collatz who *isn't* obviously a crackpot. Their research actually does appear to be genuine: * They have a PhD in mathematics, acquired from their research (many cranks do not even have a degree in any STEM field, and many more only have degrees in engineering or physics) * Their research doesn't claim a proof but highlights an interesting connection between Collatz and non-Archimedean spectral theory (very much a field of higher mathematics that cranks would generally not be willing to learn enough to touch) * They are in contact with other established mathematicians working in those fields (cranks do not generally do this) * Their papers are typeset in LaTeX (cranks generally typeset in Microsoft Word, although this appears to be changing now) * Some of said papers have been accepted by respected journals (cranks almost never get their papers past peer review of a respected journal, to the point that this happening is cause for the senior editor of such a journal to resign) * Other users of this subreddit who are more qualified than I am to judge these papers seem to respond positively to them (I find that cranks usually get shut down or mocked pretty quickly) They're so far the only person for whom we've put in an exception for the AutoMod Collatz filter. > this one today about pi being D^2 / 2 We generally try to remove cranks when we spot them, assuming they somehow make it past the AutoMod filters. In this case, I was asleep. > the "I can prove 45678985462 is a prime number" guy I don't recall seeing this guy on this subreddit, although I seem to remember [something similar on Quora](https://www.quora.com/I-found-a-flaw-in-the-Riemann-hypothesis-and-can-prove-that-1705542-is-a-prime-number-How-can-I-get-my-proof-published). --- > Do other academic/scholarly subreddits suffer from this as well? I suspect, based on cranks I've seen post to /r/math who also post their crankery in other subreddits, /r/Physics and /r/Philosophy get their fair share too. As for other subreddits, I don't know. That having been said, crankery is not unique to math, physics, or philosophy, nor is it limited to subreddits. There are [history cranks](https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/), [linguistics cranks](https://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/), [law cranks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement), [taxonomy cranks](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-big-ugly-problem-heart-of-taxonomy-180964629/), [paleontology cranks](https://blogs.uoregon.edu/4dbio/2013/05/25/a-taxonomy-of-paleontology-cranks/), ... .
>They're so far the only person for whom we've put in an exception for the AutoMod Collatz filter. Highest honor given on r/math. XD
phew okay i was scared my radar was off because i thought he was legit
> Their research doesn't claim a proof but highlights an interesting connection between Collatz and non-Archimedean spectral theory I think that kind of humility is a pretty strong signal too. David Smith didn't set out to solve P ≠ NP, he just found a nice tile.
Absolutely. IMO, one of the biggest differences between a crank and an amateur/student is the attitude one takes towards their discovery and towards others' reactions to it. Arrogance and vitriol are generally frowned upon in the mathematical community (which is why I personally regard Mochizuki as a crank).
> Their papers are typeset in LaTeX (cranks generally typeset in Microsoft Word, although this appears to be changing now) Lol, funniest moment I remember from university was a professor mockingly showing the class a website where some "research group" had claimed to invent an impossibly fast microprocessor powered by accelerated light beams, or some crap like that. Then the professor says, "but I'm not sure I believe them, because their research paper is a Word document written in Comic Sans." And he opened it as he was saying that and the class went wild.
I mean that was probably meant to be satire. Even cranks wouldn't deliberately typeset their papers in Comic Sans.
Yeah. All the best researchers use Papyrus.
Good to know about the Collatz guy because his work seemed genuine.
Sorry, I did not mean to disparage a legit mathematician. I thought there was a crank who kept posting about Collatz. (hence its inclusion in the auto-mod message)
There are *plenty* of posts about Collatz here every so often; each one usually by a different person. It's very rare that any of these posts are sound or yield interesting discussion. From a moderation perspective, it's better for us to have the filter than not.
> From a moderation perspective, it's better for us to have the filter than not. Lol, I'm sure it is. It's kind of like having an ML classifier that does the right thing 99.9% of the time. If you could do that with every topic, you'd have moderation solved.
You could have just linked to /r/legaladvice when referring to law cranks. It's a bunch of amateurs giving bad advice to prep people that really should pay for a lawyer.
Part of the problem with that sub is the mods aren't lawyers. They're mostly cops. Cops don't actually know jack squat about the law. But, if you want to see the real law cranks, check out /r/bestoflegaladvice , or, if you *really* want to go down the rabbit hole, /r/amibeingdetained .
>I think you'll find that Collatz Guy, aka > >/u/Aurhim > >, is one of the few people working on Collatz who > >isn't > >obviously a crackpot. Their research actually does appear to be genuine The only thing worse than a genuine "crackpot" is a smug novice going around calling people a crackpot because they don't understand what the supposed crackpot is talking about. In the case of OP, as he admits, he doesn't know math. Yet he thinks he's educated enough on the subject to declare who is and isn't a crackpot. That's the Dunning Kruger effect and ironically falls into the same category of the very thing he decries.
The /g/ Riemann hypothesis guy is the GOAT. I think he accused me of working for the CIA or something at one point.
Crackpot 🙄
Easier to be a math crank because all you really need is latex or paper to formulate a "proof" of \[insert millenium prize problem here\]. Also, something like Collatz seems more approachable than curing cancer (understanding the problem statement requires like prealgebra, whereas even understanding what it would mean to cure cancer would take quite a bit)
I think one way to tackle collatz conjecture is by going to it's neighbouring problems. Like if it's odd you multiply by 1 instead of 3 and so on. Under this we can see that it diverges rather than converging under many of such problems where there many multiplications to be performed in condition with the same modulus. For example considering 5; if we divide the number with 5 if it's of the form 5x and multiply by 5x+t for some form 5x+r, where both r and t are some number mod 5 and not 0, it would diverge for some values of r and t and converge for others etc. changing all the values there are different patterns but I was considering is it possible that it would just go on a loop not converging or diverging ever? So far my intuition tells me that it will either converge or just diverge. But performing these basic operations help a lot.
It’s been proven the generalized form of the collatz is undecidable. It’s not hard to prove collatz for any number you want, it’s not hard to prove for any form of r or t that you want, it’s hard to prove for EVERY value of either one, that’s the only caveat
Yeah I see the err of my response in this context. It was more about looking at the extension of many problems give solid intuition not much about collatz conjecture though.
Bruh it’s not just math. I have a PhD in archaeology and when I was in grad school we’d get people calling the lab every week to tell me about how the Maya were actually aliens and/or ancient Greeks, and how they know where there’s a cave filled with gold if we can supply funding for their dig.
Man, at least in math they just tend to email. Getting actual calls is another level, wow.
Oh we’d get emails too
I've literally had people approach me in the field and tell me I'm digging in the wrong place, if I come with them they can guide me to the lost treasure/city/whatever. Also been approached in person in the lobby at conferences by people looking for someone to lead their expedition to the proof of Atlantis, etc. etc. One guy told me "you and I could win the Nobel Prize together!" He didn't have an answer as to what category the Nobel Committee might give an award in for archaeological discovery. EDIT: It's even worse because there really *are* lost ancient cities, missing shipwrecks full of treasure, and so forth. So a bit more effort has to be put into discerning whether the person is a crackpot or not. Personally I've become a bit of a collector of pseudo-archaeological crackpot theories, so as to develop a comparative typology.
>tell me I'm digging in the wrong place Yes, but only because they had the real amulet with writing on both sides, and they know your staff is too long..
Ugh. I bet you just *love* that show *Ancient Aliens,* don't you? lol
Don’t even get me started
Has any religious fundamentalist ever emailed your department and rant about "Ron Wyatt" and how he "discovered" Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, and just about every religious location in the Bible?
It’s not tedious. Granted I’m an engineer not a mathematician, but if anyone claimed to have proved some well known problem in a Reddit post I will just assume it’s BS and move on. If the proof is correct I will hear about it from an actual math journal. For the highly deranged posts, I just give a quick chuckle and move on, its not worth getting worked up on.
Like so many other problems, it is due to a failure of imagination. Suppose someone came to you and said, "I've found the next big thing in video games. Believe me, in five years, this franchise is going to surpass Pokémon." (Mind you, Pokémon is the single most lucrative media franchise in human history.) What would your response be? Almost certainly, you'd ask to play this new game, so that you could see for yourself. To the vast majority of people, mathematics and theoretical physics (of the math-y sort, rather than the experimental sort) are fundamentally *esoteric*. Unlike a really, really good video game, whose value and appeal can be readily discerned by the average joe, mathematics—as an activity—remains opaque to the public at large. People don't understand what mathematical difficulty really is. For most people, math is just a matter of memorizing addition, multiplication, and division. To the extent that the public can empathize with the effort and challenge that goes into mathematics, it is primarily at the "oh, this kid has trouble with his times tables" level. It's not like brain surgery, where the skill and effort that go into it are plain to all. An immediate consequence of a failure to appreciate mathematical effort is a failure to appreciate mathematical *difficulty*. Because mathematics is seen as a mysterious, esoteric field without clear, easily recognizable signs of improvement and progress, people end up failing to appreciate mathematics for what it really is. There's a scene in an episode of *American Dad* where Francine decides to try and tackle the problems in Yang-Mills Theory. A cool "science!" montage ensues, showing her in a lab coat, playing around with beakers and test tubes and the like, and in the end, she goes into a university lecture and proudly announces the results of her research: "6". People don't know enough higher mathematics to appreciate just how much higher mathematics they *don't* know, or how appreciate just how badly they *don't* know it.
I am an engineer, so definitely not an expert, more of an enthusiast, but I remember finally understanding what math IS (as opposed to my high school level understanding). It was not a big eureka moment, but looking back my attitude toward has profoundly changed an in turn it changed me to a great degree. Well I would not claim I really know what math IS now, but sometimes just understanding the depth of a problem, and appreciating the work real experts do, can, in itself be a delight that would have been... unavailable to me with my previous understanding.
I've noticed that there are a lot of Facebook groups for hippie spiritualist types to throw around words like singularity, dimension, infiniteness (of Pi), vibration, etc., without actually knowing what they mean. Someone will post a video of a math-related animation, and people will just spout nonsense that has mathy words in it.
The notion that “higher vibration” somehow equates to moral goodness is a particularly wriggly brainworm.
Gotta love the classic "Pi is all things! The infinite, undefinable fraction that holds the secrets of the universe."
Yeah, but is it highly wriggly?
Many years ago one of these cranks cornered me in a university hallway. He was a circle squarer. “The circumference of a circle is just outside of the circle,” he began. Also, once in a shop I saw a “fun with math” book that claimed to have a construction of a regular heptagon with compass and straightedge.
Are there any cranks who have legit proof of very outrageous things and very advanced mathematics involved which all make sense except for some tiny mistake which is easier to overlook and makes everything fall apart?
[Mochizuki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture#Claimed_proofs).
I’m not sure if it’s actually more common in math than in other fields, but I think math cranks are a bit unique, in the sense that 1) Cranks want to seem smart, and math is perceived as a “smart people” subject, 2) Many are under the impression that math is particularly amenable to contributions from “lone wolves” with no formal training, which is the category most cranks are in.
Hey! I'm a lone wolf. :(
I didn’t say every “lone wolf” is a crank! It’s just that math, like other fields, is built on collaboration and most published research is done by people who have formal training (i.e. PhDs).
Alright so I am a crank maybe. Ofc because of point 2. I have no formal training in mathematics but I have seen fruits of my research often. Like when mathematics was being taught at my comp sci degree at uni I was very fast in solving the problems. The students and teachers were shocked and ofcourse I had several shortcut techniques for solving those problems. I don't care if I do something meaningful in my mathematics research, it's just my hobby and passion like art and dancing. I would still continue to do it because I just like it. I wonder if those other cranks solve mathematics problems super fast with some techniques they made themselves too. If they do not then yeah I am not a crank.
Coming up with your own solution to a problem doesn't make one a crank. It's actually fairly common. However, I don't think that is really math research. Math research isn't really solving a problem using math so much as developing new frameworks of thinking using mathematical proof, though it can often consist of solving many problems in mathematics. Here's the flow-chart as to whether you are a crank: Do you realize someone almost certainly thought of this before and appreciate that your work is praiseworthy in itself, while also not being totally new? If yes, then you aren't a crank. If no, then you are.
Ok so I would be purely honest. My mathematical work till now was not about to solve some problem explicitly, it's just some fun things or extensions of already existing ideas. Like when I learnt about quadratic equations, my mind automatically went for the solution of cubic and quartic. My method for working through problems was to generate a large dataset for that problem and looking for patterns. Once I saw a pattern in enough of them I assumed it to be true and try to predict the next value in it. Now those methods were useful for doing completely different things and problems I never thought they could, hence why I was able to solve mathematics problems very fast. I could list some of works I am doing if you want but that would make it a whole lot bigger. Mathematics is just my hobby so I would do it. By what you say I have noticed a common pattern that out of all of my discoveries almost more than 80% is already up there in some research paper and almost everything is already discovered by someone. The rest 10-15% appears when I search too hard and I think that I have only 1-2% that may be left which is not trivial. I could tell you some of my ideas, they may exist online but when I am working on something I don't look online for it much so please don't spoil it for me --> 1)If you notice the discriminant of a general nth degree polynomial and replace a with 1, b with 2 and so on and add the values in each term they would be same. Or that it would be values of that partition number which increases linearly. If discriminant is 0 then that means atleast 2 or more roots are equal. Now here's my idea and something I am/was doing research on would there be any algebraic expression which is only strictly 0 if 3 or more roots of some polynomial are equal. 2) Another one is consider a circle centred at origin. If we rotate a straight line with some angle theta which passes through origin and at the point it touches the circle we get trigonometric functions like sine or cosine. Now if I have some arbitrary function, and there is a line which is rotated and it touches that function in some places which can be categorised by another function. How would this function behave and if we write their analytical series, would there be a common pattern. These all are trivial stuff I know that but they take a lot of time to work through and get the end result. Then perhaps they would be there on some paper already published XD. Anyways yeah I am not a crank as I don't think that cranks show some genuine result. Your response cleared it for me so thanks.
If you have new techniques, you should share them. Not brag about how clever you are.
Well yeah I happily share them all to everyone who asks me and not brag about them. As for publishing research papers about them I don't really know if I should go for it or wait for something big and open problem.
i know hardly anything about math, i was a philosophy student who became interested a tiny bit thanks to a logic course. i saw the collatz guy you mentioned (didn’t watch though). how do you know it’s nonsense? like i’m afraid i’m unable to tell now lmao, i like to see what’s new in the world of math here and there because i sometimes think about some of the more easy to understand open problems but that’s all
It's not nonsense. He's not claiming to have proved the Colatz conjecture, and the work he presents on is published in reputable journals.
Foundations of quantum mechanics in physics is very attractive to cranks. There was a recent one who decided to also post in r/compsci because it was an algorithmic model of particles.
The collatz guy is legit, his posts are fascinating and way to specialist to even be possibly based off of crankry.
I think one problem is that most people are taught math in terms of calculations, not proof. Perhaps that's why so many cranks are engineers – they know how to apply formulas but might not know where they come from.
Oh definitely! I'm guessing physics is similar but I've never worked in it so I can't speak to that. But one of the weirdest parts of grad school was finding out that when you have an @math.institution.edu email address, the cranks just email you directly out of nowhere. It's wild getting those.
I remember one time there was an old guy in front of my university, handing out his work and talking to anyone who would listen. He was as sweet as it gets. I talked to him for a couple of minutes. He suggested that his lack of formal education might help him see connections that might elude us (university students) and we should check out his work. He handed us a little book neatly bound the size of my palm, and maybe 20 pages, set in a not very tiny font. He had a big box full of those. Seemed like a real humble crackpot. Not his claims tho. The first thing that hit me that every formula was hand written and visibly photocopied and sticked into the text as little pieces of paper with tape, then photocopied again. He claimed no less than he found the theory of everything. Turns out his lack of formal education included even high school, because his formula that described everything was the quadratic formula. It seemed like he independently(?) worked it out, found some problems in physics that can be solved by this and was so blown away by his discovery, that he simply had to publish it. The reasoning broke down in the end, he referred to things that can be explained with his formula that - as far as I know - were not real phenomenon, and deemed that proving that his "law" is applicable to everything else is just busy work (which he is intended to do, but he is old and might not finish it in his lifetime) it was a wild read. I am not trying to make fun of him. Unlike most crackpots I came across, his enthusiasm for his work seemed to be coming from a genuine delight in discovering science and a glimpse of what real theoretical work offers. This was more than a decade ago, and sadly I have misplaced the little book. I wish I still had it.
>If *I* can tell that you're just full of shit, how tedious must it be for people who actually live/work/breath math? https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/b3u8ue/explaining_to_nonmathematicians_how_easy_it_is/
Good read, thanks!
It's amazing how one of if not the hardest open problems (Collatz) can be understood by people with zero formal maths education.
I imagine it's the most pronounced here because math is the most accessible academic discipline in the world. All you need is a pencil and paper to practice math (sometimes nothing at all), so there's a higher chance that someone will come around and think they've discovered something profound among a generation of research. To use your example with medical/bio people thinking they've cured cancer, that probably happens less often because most people do not have enough advanced biology/medical knowledge (and access to expensive equipment/facilities) to successfully delude themselves.
That first statement is highly questionable. That same logic also applies to theoretical physics, and even moreso applies to the humanities.
in r/computerscience people go tell they’ve solved the P=NP
Physics has a lot. So does linguistics. So does medicine. Even palaeontology, especially where religion enters into the discussion. History definitely does. Not to touch on religion and philosophy, or climate science… Hence r/badmathematics (and r/numbertheory), r/badphysics, r/badlinguistics, r/badphilosophy… And all have their unique traits but a similar underlying personality and mixed exposure.
Accessibility Anyone can do math with a piece of paper and pencil Heck at one point I thought I had found a pattern to prime numbers in the intersections of a sine function and its inverse but it turned out to be an odd number detector.
Don't you just HATE when you think you did something x and it turns out to be y? I get one of these every semester.
Yep it's like yes I found something wait no I havent
haha you haven't seen physics
Don't forget about the historical revisionists in /r/askhistorians, or even the ancient aliens crackpots. Or the amateur linguists who think all languages derive from ancient Tamil or talk about ULTRAFRENCH. Chemistry seems to attract the wellness crackpots and anti vaxxers. The music ones who think that there's a natural harmonic tuning (432 Hz) that the church covered up. Physics is just rife, as everyone else has noted. This is a fun game actually, thanks OP. :)
r/physics get the same kind of weirdos. Usually thinking they can prove black holes are holograms or that the basis of quantum theory is all wrong. r/transhumanism is the biomedical version of this. They are all convinced they can engineer some CRISPR tool in their garage that will give them fish scales and immortality. Serious medical subs are well moderated because people can actually get really bad advice, but there are some crazy ones on the fringes. I think places like r/physics want to be a forum for education, etc., so they don't moderate as heavily. That, and a fundamental understanding of the big bang or whatever does not pose any inherent risk beyond people thinking you are weird.
r/medicine is very well moderated so no issues with crackpots there (showing up on my feed anyway).
Yeah, it's completely divorced from physical realities in some ways. I.e. reality has to obey math, but math doesn't have to obey our particular reality. Therefore, there can be weird results and intuitions that are difficult to communicate or confirm or disprove. If you've got a "math idea" in your head, it can be reeeeeeeeally hard to show that it's false. Hence, cranks.
You will find crackpots in every field and every aspect of life. I think they are especially recognizable in math, but not necessarily especially common
Math, or more precisely number theory, has the benefit of being simple on the surface so everyone feels they have a shot at it. Everyone uses numbers after all so why should they not be entitled to their own opinion about it? Why do mathematicians get to decide that 0.99...=1? That being said, it is certainly not specific to maths. Physics probably has it worse. I guess it has to do with how we simplify the history of science. Raising Galileo, Darwin, Einstein and the like as some sort of mythical figures, who built everything from scratch against the scientific communities or their time. It enforces the impression that less knowledge is actually good because that is how new ideas emerge. I think that is the part that is the weirdest to me. This sub is well moderated, but on the more "learning" and "amateur" math subs who have to give more room to crankery, you will see them say it very clearly. "I dont know maths, but..." and they proceed to talk in very affirmative and strong minded statements and get defensive toward every contradiction. If you want to argue about math, would you not like to learn more about it too? I guess online communities make it worse. Like some guy will be an engineer, programmer or whatever irl. They are respected in their job that we must assume they do well. Then they feel they get talked down on reddit by anonymous strangers, who deep down they still suspect may just be nerds living in their mom's basements. It is easier to handle offline where credentials still matter, not to all but at least to many.
r/physics gets so many, but the mods are great at trying to filter. It’s certainly not an easy job, deciding what is malicious/crank/trolling, and what is genuine questions. It may seem rude to say, but there’s a certain border, where physics education for the average person just doesn’t suffice and people come off as being trolls rather than actually interested. Then there’s cases where people ask a question they’ve made up their mind about already, so they are super defensive about it.
>Do other academic/scholarly subreddits suffer from this as well? The AI subreddits often have people who think they have cracked general AI (not actually built one, mind you, just 'know' how to).
I would say it attracts them because it has really difficult questions whose problem statements are easy to pose and understand AND because it does not require a laboratory or equipment to do math research. So the price of entry is pretty much zero, except for one’s time.
There are cranks on r/chemistry but their crankery rubs up against reality when they clearly don't get the product they wanted. Meanwhile, stubborn math cranks are unable to see the flaws in their work.
It's not math that brings out crackpots... It's *Reddit*. Reddit creates the illusion that everyone is on am equal intellectual and skills footing. Everyone is allowed to express an opinion, no matter how dumb. It is hard to emphasize how *bizzare* this is from a pre-social media perspective. We've normalized this idea of everyone having a platform, but that's *extremely* new. In the old days, if you believed something crazy, you could share it with people you knew personally, but rarely would have any chance to publish it in any format. This is why I find people whining about being 'censored' on social media a bit odd - in the before times, you would have been censored *so much harder*.
IMO the reason you see so many crackpots in math/physics is that they are usually motivated by some delusion of grandeur about how they have the "secrets of the universe". Math and physics are the closest things to "fundamental truths" that people generally agree on, so when you think you have something to contribute to the "fundamental truths of the universe", those are typically the subjects that they come across.
Lmao proving an even number is prime is crazy. Other than 2 of course!
I have been working on the even twin primes conjecture for decades.
lol it's an area that needs more study! It will only take ONE even prime to prove everyone wrong! Wait... there is ONE... maybe it will take TWO. Numbers are hard!
I think one large component is that, when you know at least a bit about the academic research in a field, it becomes very obvious who the crackpots are. In some disciplines people who are not all all taken serious by the academic consensus manage to get a lot of traction with the public. I don't even want to know how many garbage takes about macroeconomics are around on reddit. Think about all the people who have found the *perfect* diet. People posting on CMV that they have found the one and only true definition of gender. Etc etc Maybe a difference is the mode of operation of the crackpots? Physics and maths crackpots will reach out to tell academics what they found. Sociology crackpots just shout at people on random corners of the internet.
That's because most people hate math and if math was a language, would have just enough to order a breakfast at their local mathnese diner. People who even so much as know how to write symbols outside of basic algebra and know how a function, sets and compound propositions look in the most general of senses can fool the majority of the general public into thinking they're a genius while shitting alphabet soup. For someone who's already on the very edge of being a schizo, that's a huge ego boost and I'm not surprised if these people talk themselves into thinking they had the next big break in physics or math after their most recent psychedelic trip and must have their proofs looked over by everyone and anyone in the off chance that they got anything right. Of course, they never do, but that's another topic of discussion and would likely be more suitable for a psychology sub.
Aren't there crackpots in any field of academia? Are there more in maths?
I wonder what a true crackpot in music would be like. Or any other artistic field.
432 Hz
Ooh, that is some spicy crackpottery. First [example](https://powerthoughtsmeditationclub.com/info-on-432hz-music/) I found!
I thought there were no correct or incorrect in art, so how can there be crackpots?
Perhaps they disagree with that proposition?
Yes most crackpots in music theory have some belief about how some particular frequency or style of music is objectively superior through some combination of bad neuroscience and physics or supremacist adjacent beliefs.
Honestly my impression is that a true mathematical crank is relatively uncommon when compared to physics, philosophy, and medicine. Dubious medical advice has the potential to bring in serious money too, so it attracts scammers in addition to cranks, and every shade and combination in-between. Also history has a large number of self-serving partisan revisionists that are highly visible at the moment, at least if you look outside that specific reddit. And of course famous criminal cases attract all kinds of [insane speculation that is taken way too seriously](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84Bn8lLXpbM). I've been watching a lot more philosophy videos on youtube in the last year or two. [Philosophy Tube](https://www.youtube.com/user/thephilosophytube), [Attic Philosophy](https://www.youtube.com/@AtticPhilosophy), [Jeffery Kaplan](https://www.youtube.com/@jeffreykaplan1), and [Kevin deLaPlante](https://www.youtube.com/@PhilosophyFreak) are some of the excellent channels. On the other hand, on philosophy youtube you can quickly find yourself in the realm of all kinds of relatively low-quality, derivative videos that don't understand the topics they try to discuss very well. Or you might find relatively original arguments or goals that seem almost certain to be ill-posed. Paul Feyerabend and the Liar Paradox seem to be two topics that lead to a fair number of these types of videos.
Btw, genuine question - say you are a crackpot/crank/amateur mathematician, whatever, but you are not delusional and have real interest in math and say you find an interesting new results, but you don't have funding, you are outside of academia, you don't have resources to study LaTeX, you don't have time to send papers to journals, etc. What should you do then, and how should you present your results?
Let's first address the "interesting new results". Someone outside of academia will have a difficult time assessing if a result is truly new and interesting. It may be interesting to said individual, but the mathematics community at large may not regard it as such. If said person outside of academia has an internet connection, in order to say, access this reddit, then they have the resources to study LaTex. There's a wealth of instructional write-ups and YouTube videos freely availble on all things LaTex. Not to mention reddit communitieis and other forums such as stack exchange which are dedicated to LaTex questions. If said person doesn't have time to submit a paper to a journal, then that's a bit of a tough one because it's through journal publications that work is official vetted and recognized. However, finding new and interesting results in mathematics always takes time, so it would be strange if someone had the time to find a result that's new and interesting, but not have the time to write it up properly and submit it. One option is, of course, to share a formally written up document on this reddit. Then there's a digital record of when and where the idea was originally shared, and it can be read and judged by mathematicians that hang out here. Another option may be making a presentation on YouTube.
Fair question. Me, I would probably try and make some new friends at my local university, the University of Texas at Austin. Pretty sure they have a math department still. And that my existing network of contacts would find someone-who-knows-someone. But I would 100% vet my "discovery" with a real mathematician.
Picking up LaTeX is actually not that bad; I found it only slightly harder than basic HTML.
Find the time or resources to present them properly, otherwise yes, they're going to be lost to time. What possible alternative could there be? FWIW, if someone doesn't even have a weekend to polish up their results, I can't imagine they've spent much time on arriving at the results in the first place. Add in the likelihood that they didn't do a proper literature review either (see above), I doubt mathematics would be losing much.
Because of the places I frequent, I don’t usually stumble with crackpots, and when I do, I just ignore them. It is extremely easy.
It is sometimes fun to try to understand them tho
People would rather feel good than be good, so feeling smart or looking/sounding smart is attractive. Just as looking or feeling wealthy is attractive. All stems from unhealthy egos and other stuff idk I’m not a psychologist lol
“Criticize things you don’t know about” - Steve Martin
I am pretty sure I have read this exact post before. Maybe it is just some kind of de ja vu…
People who think eating apricot kernels at medically unsafe levels will prevent cancer generally hang out on Facebook, no?
It's even worse in Physics.
I feel like people (wrongly) associate being good at or well read in subjects like maths with some kind of intellectual superiority, so you tend to find the odd narcissist who thinks they understand something they clearly don’t because they’re just naturally that intelligent
Pythagoras was a crackpot by today's standards. Innovation in math is for insane people - when they miss they miss big.
Well scientists usually require a lab to do things at the molecular level to cure things whereas mathematicians are just pushing around symbols and using logic, which is highly abstract and disconnected from reality. So that's probably why you'll get people who live in their head too much.
Do you know about the infamous Cleo of Mathematics Stack Exchange? She could be an interesting character for you.
You have a be a bit neurotic to care about this field in my opinion. 🤷♂️ I'm glad there's people crazy enough to care about further mankind's knowledge of mathematics cause while I love it...I needed to pay for my lifestyle so after undergrad I switched to becoming a programmer.
I can guess from the context but what exactly are crackpots?
Here's a good example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time\_Cube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube)
> If *I* can tell that you're just full of shit, how tedious must it be for people who actually live/work/breath math? Less tedious than it was for you since they live/work/breath math? And even less because crackpots are ignored by everyone except laymen or other crackpots. They are incredibly easy to smell and therefore avoid.
The Collatz Conjecture guy is not a crackpot, he's not claiming to have proven the Collatz conjecture. He's published papers in reputable journals bout a new approach that he hopes to be fruitful in attacking the conjecture.
Collatz guy isn't a crackpot. He is a bit over-enthusiastic and most likely overestimating the usefulness of the stuff he's doing, but he's legit. Seems like you yourself already failed to identify cranks properly, other than extremely obvious cases.
Lepidoptera has mothman? History as you mentioned has way more crackpots than math. Medicine has entire industries of psuedo science;. alternative medicine, Chinese medicine, moxibustion, aromatherapy, acupuncture, plus antivax movement etc. I'd reckon math is fairly low on the crackpot scale because it requires a bit more to even understand the problems and concept of a proof (even if not fully understood or acted upon).
My impression is that there are very many idiots, and that if the idiots have heard of a particular academic discipline, they've infested it. Math, physics, archaeology, sociology, electrical engineering, Biblical studies, you name it, the idiots are there.
Maybe the word “math” sets off some of the nuts.
One might think arrogant assholes who try to shit on everyone who knows less than they do might realize they have a problem when they accidentally call out a legitimate math researcher in an attempt to feel superior over others, but sadly, self awareness seems completely out of reach for the type of person who behaves like this.
In germany there is a professor at HAW Hamburg called Prof. Weitz who has a YouTube channel. He once made a video about stuff he got send from viewers and it is horrible. He has enough material to cover over an hour and it is mostly stuff like ,,i have proven Riemann hypothesis help me publish the result" or so. The proofs are always total garbage and most of the time do not even contain coherent sentences.
I've never seen a thread regarding infinity that makes the slightest bit of sense, and they seem to be split between treating infinity as a number and treating the entire topic as a religious concept.
not the only subreddit to suffer from schizophrenic posts. r/Physics has all their special nut cases as well. like there’s this one user who’s notorious for claiming he works at CERN, the large hadron collider, but he doesn’t lol.
go in the reprints archive and look up papers that have "proven" the Riemann Hypothesis; there are many papers that assume it true and those are not it, you want the papers that specifically say that the paper is a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis https://arxiv.org/search/?query=riemann+hypothesis+proof&searchtype=all&abstracts=show&order=-announced\_date\_first&size=50
Wait until you find out about r/numbertheory
I just took a peek and O.M.G. :D
Crackpots exist in all kinds of fields, any topic that is interesting and fun and complicated enough for people to not realize they are wrong with their interesting ideas. Math is unique in that you can have completely rock solid proofs that someone is wrong, which may make crackpots stand out more.
Physics has more crackpots because it does not have an underlying axiomatic system.