What if I think that all of the numbers are uninteresting? Does that make them all interesting? But doesn't that, in turn, make all of them uninteresting?
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Suppose that's why it's called a paradox
🤯
Here's a nerdy math way.
Assume that some numbers are not interesting. Let n be the smallest non-interesting number. Since n is the smallest number that's not interesting, it is interesting.
I don't think I can think of anything less interesting than a grade school pseudo-paradox.
1730 seems pretty uninteresting to me, and that hasn't changed after taking a few minutes to check if there's anything that makes it less than dull.
1729 is a very interesting number.
1730... is not.
So, I picked it by choosing 12^3 + 2. I wanted to start with something easily factored (power of 12) and not too small, but not interesting because of its factorization. And I wanted it to be even, since odd numbers tend to have funny quirks. So a simple +2.
What's amusing is that I did this before looking at the Wikipedia page. According to that, the original number that inspired this paradox was 1729. So just by happenstance, I picked one integer higher than the original "uninteresting" number. Which I guess arguably makes 1730 interesting now (though admittedly not for mathematical reasons).
And so it becomes true.
"Noteworthy" and "interesting" aren't synonyms.
Gad, you've got me doing it!
"Remarkable." "Fascinating."
You may think you're a Trekkie, but did you know that the first Star Trek parody show was a one season flop called "Quark?" It was about an interstellar garbage scow, and it had a crew including two clones.
the interestingness of numbers is a field that fulfills Laplace's equation, with the constraint that 0 is infinitely interesting, and the interestingness converges to zero for n -> infinity.
Four
Four is bad luck in Japanese superstition, because its pronunciation ('shi') is the same as the word for 'death'.
But if 2 numbers arent interesting, they wont become interesting from not being interesting because there are multiple of them
It's kind of interesting that there are 2 of them.
But neither of them are individually interesting, only together