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Math Nerds Need Social Networks, Too

By drorzel on November 24, 2007.

It turns out that there's a Facebook group for quantum information types called the Church of the Larger Hilbert Space after a remark by John Smolin (Facebook link here), which I thought was the nerdiest thing I ever saw. Until I looked at the "Related Groups," and saw "I support the right to choose one element from each set in a collection" (here, if you have access), which is, of course, a political group for people who are Pro-(Axiom-of-)Choice. Who are, of course, opposed by "The Axiom of Life (aka Negation of Axiom of Choice)" (here). Both of those are nerdier than the Church of the Larger Hilbert Space.

Lest you think that there's nothing but frivolous fake political groups on there, though, there are people who are using Facebook to do useful research. Such as, for example, these guys, who plan to use it to prove the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis:

So, the GCH may be independent of Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory, but this need not keep us down. We've decided to decide the CH once and for all by simply managing to get a group with Aleph-One members, and then to count the number of members in our group to determine whether Aleph-One=C

They're got 44 members at the time of this writing, so only Aleph-1 to go...

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math
silliness

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