Tap to unmute
Mathematicians Use Numbers Differently From The Rest of Us
Embed
- Published on Jun 5, 2023 veröffentlicht
- There's a strange number system, featured in the work of a dozen Fields Medalists, that helps solve problems that are intractable with real numbers. Head to brilliant.org/veritasium to start your free 30-day trial, and the first 200 people get 20% off an annual premium subscription.
If you're looking for a molecular modeling kit, try Snatoms - a kit I invented where the atoms snap together magnetically: snatoms.com
▀▀▀
References:
Koblitz, N. (2012). p-adic Numbers, p-adic Analysis, and Zeta-Functions (Vol. 58). Springer Science & Business Media.
Amazing intro to p-adic numbers here: • 1 Billion is Tiny in a...
Excellent series on p-adic numbers: • p adic numbers. Part 1...
Great videos by James Tanton: @JamesTantonMath
▀▀▀
Special thanks to our Patreon supporters:
Emil Abu Milad, Tj Steyn, meg noah, Bernard McGee, KeyWestr, Amadeo Bee, TTST, Balkrishna Heroor, John H. Austin, Jr., john kiehl, Anton Ragin, Diffbot, Gnare, Dave Kircher, Burt Humburg, Blake Byers, Evgeny Skvortsov, Meekay, Bill Linder, Paul Peijzel, Josh Hibschman, Mac Malkawi, Juan Benet, Ubiquity Ventures, Richard Sundvall, Lee Redden, Stephen Wilcox, Marinus Kuivenhoven, Michael Krugman, Sam Lutfi.
▀▀▀
Written by Derek Muller and Alex Kontorovich
Edited by Trenton Oliver
Animated by Mike Radjabov, Ivy Tello, Fabio Albertelli and Jakub Misiek
Filmed by Derek Muller
Additional video/photos supplied by Getty Images & Pond5
Music from Epidemic Sound & Jonny Hyman
Produced by Derek Muller, Petr Lebedev, & Emily Zhang
These are literally scientific documentaries of the highest quality at this point. It's amazing that I'm able to watch this stuff for no cost at all. Thank you so much Veritasium
@Leeroy Jenkins revanced youtube moment, ads blocked, sponsored segments skpped automatically
@Geniuz yessir
It's all thanks to Patreons and sponsors
@Leeroy Jenkins I'm not paying time with time. Ads are not for everyone just like adblockers.
@Leeroy Jenkins but that's a trivial amount of time; I think the point was that there's high-quality content that's as close to free as makes no difference. You can let the ad play while you brush your teeth or watch another YT video in another tab.
The level of quality in these videos is sublime. You never insult the audiences, by not going as deep as is required. Excellent work as always
Its interesting to think of lack of depth as an insult. Why would this be so?
@Jaxon Shain Perhaps insult was not the ideal word to use. What I meant to say is that he goes deeper than alot of similar content creators, which I find enjoyable.
@Andypapandy yea I enjoy the depth as well, especially now as it is so easy to use A.I to make content.
what a mature comment section
I studied this in my teaching program. We did this to better help us understand the “Why” in math. So many steps in math we just are taught and accept, but many people can’t understand the actual mathematical reasoning that allows us to complete that step. We studied different math operations in various bases to quite literally re-teach ourselves math. We even used symbols instead of numbers. It was a very eye opening experience.
That sounds so cool
@Fabssiee my professor called it “Martian math”. We used symbols in place of numbers that went in a specific operation just as our numbers system in base 10 would. This way we had no prior knowledge to scaffold learning with and it was as if we were children getting exposed to numbers for the first time
@floppathebased1492 sorry for my poor explanation. We first learned how to do the various orders of math operations using different bases I.e. multiplication addition division. After that, she removed the numbers completely and instead used a random order of symbols and shapes likes triangles with slashes, then a star,etc. the point was that each of our numbers is itself a system that we have to learn and rely on. I want to say we were using base seven and she had 6 different Symbols before they’d move place value and repeat like our traditional number system. I hope that makes more sense and sorry for the confusion.
I'm currently on that journey of learning the "why" in math.
Like for example I tried explaining to my gf how we can put
- * - = +
But in a real life example and God that was difficult to do lol.
I've tried looking online and all I got were proofs.
But the best example I've gotten so far was.
Suppose you record someone walking, you're using a tape player to capture the footage.
You allow that tape to play forward, person walks forward (+)
You then reverse that tape (-)
Person walking forward (+)
Now walking backward(-)
Now allow that person walking backward (-)
Play the tape backward again (-)
Person walks forward (+).
I have no other examples but a tape player really because I've never known an object to be "negative".
I feel like negative numbers exist in 4 Dimensional objects and time is one of them.
Which is why we can sort of have the power to "control time" by recording footage and playing it back
@Aaron Factor hey very late comment lol but is there any chance you have some pointers for what you are talking about somewhere online? Or in a book or something? Or at least least similar?
My brain just turned to mushed slime and left out of my ears, this needs to be a 10 hour course to be understood even to the slightest level. He just used algebra, geometry, number theory, series, and everything else and expects us to get a hang of it. There is more stuff in this video than in my whole 12th grade mathematics textbook. Whatever little i understood tho, completely blew my mind. Love all the videos. I do stubbornly wanna pursue math and physics further, but i think my puny brain will never grasp such grand concepts. Let alone be able to contribute anything further to the progress. ❤
gotta be big brain, whole new level of understanding, and its an area of study that is completely new to us, i felt just like this.
it's not that complicated
You've got to be doing something right when I was absolutely surprised when the video had ended, and I was longing to know more. I'm by no measure a "math person", and yet I was able to follow along for the larger part of the video with the calculations and by means of the visualization and explanation make connections between things I've up until now had no idea were related. Had I the time, and were my goals for the future ever so slightly different, I'd probably plunge right into the world of mathematics just because of how fascinating what this revealed was. Even though, this has not in fact moved me to such extreme action, it has come rather close in that I will now forever see the mathematical concepts discussed in this video in a different way.
I’m going to go into calculus for both of us, bro, wish me luck
@tquasagood luck👍👍😃, get good grades there.
I'd heard of p-adic numbers and was vaguely familiar with their definition, but didn't know much about their motivation or applications. After watching your excellent video, I'm motivated to learn more about them.
I don't normally think of Veritasium as a math youtuber, but with videos on Newton's calculation of pi, Godel's incompleteness theorem, discrete Fourier transform, logistic map, Penrose tiling, Hilbert's hotel paradox, and various probability puzzles, he definitely should be. I mean, this video alone (p-adic numbers, Fermat's last theorem, Hensel lifting) would be an extremely ambitious topic even for a math-focused channel, and he and Alex Kontorovich did a great job with it!
absolutely
Waiting for 3B1B to pop up somewhere
Like half of his videos are math related lol
Next-up I want him to look at parker square.
Yeah...not math Clip-Sharer to me, but a sleep helper Clip-Sharer. 😂
Can I just say how much I love that you kept the same background music and outro animation for all theses years? One can get lost through life then come back to this channel years later and still feel at home. It's an underrated quality.
Your delivery of this content was absolutely sublime. You somehow took an incredibly complex topic and simplified it through examples and explanation so a relative novice can grasp it. Thankyou so much. This really made my day
It's been a while since a topic in mathematics captured my imagination so much. There is something about the p-adics that feels wrong, but also something that feels so compelling and so deep.
What a wonderful introduction and brilliantly done.
I watched this video 2 times and I got to say that spending some time on Brillient really helped.
The 1st time I didn't really get the arithmetic rules and methods of the 10-adics and p-adics.
Thanks to courses like "number-bases" I understood much better the 2nd time.
Bravo! You covered in 30 minutes what took me semesters to master in my youth. I am totally inspired.
I'm jealous that Derek gets a personal lecture from such an amazing mathematician.
I had the pleasure of meeting Alex Kontorovich in person several times by now, on conferences and a summer school. Had 2 or 3 chats with him. As far as I can tell, he really is like he comes across in these videos. And he gives the best talks, by a long shot, even when they're intended for a professional audience and not for a general one like in this video. He has a way of conveying his enthusiasm that is truly unique and exhilarating. It fills you up with passion, like you have to go and prove some theorems, now! What an awesome guy, really.
@Lone Starr Now, he'll be jealous of you too:)
An operation that only works in base 10 is not Mathematics it's just Arithmetic.
we are too since he's credited as coauthor of the video :)
@Nitin Sharma That was the intention behind telling him, lol.
I could barely learn some of the stuff in my 7th grade algebra class within a whole hour.
However with this 30 minute video, I learnt a whole new math system.
Today I felt like exactly, I am seeing a new world of mathematics…. It’s a wonderful explanation. As a data scientist and a embedded software developer I would say this level of mathematics is required very high level of intelligence to understand in a single shot. Thank you for sharing this extremely valuable piece of research work. I owe you a party for sure. 😊 keep doing…
Derek, you have literally been the person teaching me the most since I found Clip-Share. Shortly after is Destin at SmarterEveryDay, but you two give me more knowledge than I've ever wanted in so many fields. I HAAAAATE most of the subjects you cover on the surface, but when you break them down into applicable and project-oriented and realistic applications, it makes me realize my disdain for things like Mathematics and Science, is because of the academic application, versus what it means in real life. You two are truly those who have expanded my mind to forget my hatred for the academia part, and realize that it can directly apply to the "fun stuff" as well. I guess it proves the difference between "AP" and "GT" students... Same intelligence, just different applications. Regardless, this video was amazing, and thank you for the visual and practical applications.
This is the kind of clarity and explanation we need in university maths classes. So much of the time we are left to our own devices to interpret the logic of abstract claims like the "size" of a number. Textbooks usually state the mathematical relation. I fully get how hard it is to describe these things conceptually to a general population but it's so useful and it makes these things appreciated more. Looking at p-adics still freaks me out and I don't quite see them as stars but I can at least see how viewing a series as a different category of number altogether makes sense for why series are used in proofs so often to break down some what simple rational number or variable. (I'm not explaining myself properly because I know the convergence of infinite sums is useful. It's more understanding how the parts inside work and what those mean, or just another way to visualise infinite series.)
I love these videos. Even in my eighth decade, I love learning, and am fascinated by your videos. Thank you!
I’m a geologist so my maths is questionable at best.
I find it utterly fascinating how well I can follow along with this, yet still be completely bewildered and confused.
It makes you feel like your learning but it's basically entertainment because you will forget anything about it the next day.
@trout well with my adhd, I essentially forget the previous sentence because I’m having such a hard time following.
@Cycling Geologist Do you remember leaving either of these comments several hours later? I'm here to remind your brain
@Cycling Geologist Derek might say we're not visual learners, but I can see the infinity triple cylinders in my head. It's stuck there forever in endless loop to remind this video topic. No idea how to use this knowledge, since this whole video was like a rocket engineer teaching a toddler how to build a hypothetical navigation system. But give me an endless pile of cylinders, and I'll build stacks of 0, 1, 2.
yeah because you probably finished 12 years of school and didn't get shot in the process
This video is fantastic. I am very impressed with your math videos Derek, the topics are so well-presented.
This video was quite literally an 'AHA!' moment for me. It's like when you are trying to put together a difficult puzzle and have found every single edge piece except one. It is that feeling when you finally find that little bastard 3 days later and get to experience the satisfaction of gazing upon the complete frame. Such beautiful content! Thanks so much Derek, you rock!!!!
I couldn't follow it all. But it was still fascinating, and I can still appreciate how well the concept was taught.
The amount of new knowledge to me in this video is insane. I’ve never heard about p-adics and I’m so surprised and overwhelmed to receive so much new info from a Clip-Share video. Great job, Derek. The quality of your video keeps getting more and more astonishing.
I’ve never seen math explained this way. This is like beautiful art. Amazing and mind blowing! Thank you very much for sharing.
As an engineer and video editor, I am absolutely mind-blown by the production quality of this video. I can't even imagine the number of hours put into the editing alone. It's amazing that content like this is available for free. Not that your other videos aren't great as well, but this was something else.
I don't know what income 2.2m views on youtube achieves... do you?
the video editing has been done by AI tho...?
1000 views are about one dollar but that depends heavily on how advertiser friendly the content is.. this channel prolly gets way more than one dollar per 1000 views but lets calculate it with 1 dollar to stay on the safe side.. so 2200000 / 1000 = 2200 dollars. But like i said, its prolly more like 3 or 4 k. But the big money isnt in views, the big money is in sponsorships.. for a standard 60 seconds sponsorship on this kind of video and channel the sponsor prolly pays in the ballpark of 10k-50k or so for it. Should be about 10 - 50 dollars per 1000 views from a sponsor.. so in this case if we calculate with 15 bucks times 2200000 / 1000 that would be 33000 dollars but could be quite a bit more for this good of a channel thats very advertiser friendly
@Gwyn Sea 1 million is $1k. But it massively fluctuates seemingly randomly. Big channels make lot more money in other ways than they make from YT ad revenue.
its done by python software named "manim". i also made these type of videos to teach my students basic operations.
I love how the far end of infinity wraps back around to zero and negative numbers. Thanks for the mind-blowing video!
I’d love to see mathologer’s take on this. It feels like a different “proof” could be created that shows the “adic”-ness properties are false for non-prime adic’s. The cardinal value of any number should have properties that are independent of the base used to write the number down.
A lot of loves for Veritasium. Thanks a lot for making such a complex and important concept very easy to digest.
From a CS background it's quite intuitive how we calculate 1's complement and 2's complement(negetive of a number) , i believe we work in 2 adic number system. The concept of distance between two p-adic numbers too , like most significant bits and least significant bits (the pyramid visualization helped a lot )... Great video 🙌 ....
Same here
Hey very nice video. I would be very interested in a video about perfectoid spaces. I guess there is a lot of visualization, animation etc. possible, to make them understandable, to a brought community. A lot examples and use cases can be shown and explained. This would be a nice follow up to this video, as p-adic numbers have to be comprehend in order to comprehend perfectoid spaces. I let suprise myself! Hope you keep it up!
As someone who does computer science, it was extremely cool to suddenly make the connection to how we represent negative numbers using two's complement.
I see the connection, but they are finite in length... So how does it work?
@Pranav P S A negative number is actually represented in computers by the inverse of a number + 1 for example -3 would be 11111101. This is why signed integers can only represent half of the positive numbers that a unsigned integer can represent. You still can only represent 256 different values in 1 byte, and since half of them are negative, it goes from -128 to 127 instead. Since you invert a number to get two's complement, you can tell whether or not its negative by looking at the leftmost digit: if its 1, its a negative number, otherwise its 0 and therefore positive. The only difference between and unsigned vs signed integer is how the computer looks at that leftmost bit.
@Wala saurus I always thought it was a brilliant way to represent negatives. It also allows tons of algorithm tricks to work with positive and negative numbers in a fast and efficient way.
@Wala saurus what do youbmean by inverse of a number plus 1 sorry ? Why couldn't the negative of an integer in binary jist be the same as positive integer but with a negative sign? Seems clearer and more efficient to me? I'm guessing it is partly because the negstive sign means something else in binary so the computer would misinterpret it? Why don't they just change that then?
@Wala saurus and what donyou mean by invert a number to get two's complement? What is the complement of a number? Like negative and positive you mean? Never heard it referred to that way..
This was one of the most excited I have felt in learning something new in the past few years. This is incredible, thank you so much for making free content like this.
(I had all notifications on and still was not recommended the past several videos so I resubscribed for all video notifications, a heads up if you had the same problem.)
Thanks for a reasonably accessible description of the p-adic numbers!
I have read the book "Fermat's Last Theorem - by Simon Singh" he also elaborates on maths a little but the story around this problem, how it came into existence and how it took 358 Years to solve it, is what intrigued me. This is why we are the king species, it took us 358 years 5 generations to solve this but we did it and for a guy (Fermat) this was just a note on his Journal. While reading I didn't know if Fermat was right so it was a mystery every page.
Excellent explanation! I’d heard Fermat’s theorem was solved- but this is the first I’ve seen a good explanation of how.
I'm only seven minutes in, but I was thinking this felt similar to negitive numbers in the binary used in computers, and then you introduced 9's compliment... I'm excited to see what other patterns show up :)
As a computer scientist, your comparison of p-adic numbers to two's complement negative numbers was extremely helpful for getting this topic to finally "click" in my head. Thanks!
Me too!
Don't want to be negative but as a computer scientist it should all add up...
@Ray Lopez I _think_ that was a pun?... :)
@Ray Lopez nice
@Ray Lopez Intended pun?
Thank you for the amazing content Derek.
I'm sure that I learned something, I'm not however sure of what it is that I learned.
started watching this video and just had a flashback of my advanced quantitative reasoning math class. been over 10 years since ive had that class and for some reason everything makes sense to me cause i had answers that didnt make sense but seeing this made it all make sense. thank you
hope he’s getting rewarded sufficiently for all these great lectures 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
can you please a lot more on math?? your explanation and animation comes together so well.
I majored in math as an undergrad at a top engineering school. I recently found my notebooks from the classes and it’s a whole new language
I took a graduate course on p-adics in university and it felt like all I did was manipulating symbols on paper without understanding what is happening. This video finally made me understand what is going on.
The essence and beauty of mathematics is to understand, and it is pretty common to find people in academia who teach soulless mathematics. Something must be done, because learning so abstract and difficult concepts without the proper background and motivation is pointless, or so I believe.
@Bryan Castro that’s something I feel I struggle with I think math is so cool but I also don’t necessarily understand the magnitude of why this kinda crazy stuff manipulating infinity is important
Unfortunately, in NZ, P addicts result from the use of pure methamphetamine. (p = pure)
But, seriously. The use of base 3 in computing is not that hard, ground, positive to ground, negative to ground. Gound being 0 to source voltage +or-.
How can you learn more from a video on Clip-Share than a graduate course?
@Joseph Van Name "...can you learn more from a video on Clip-Share than a graduate course?"
Yes. There is a difference between studying and learning.
This is crazy....I especially love the analogy at the end.
I'm so glad that I took discreet mathematics to even be able to understand some of this
11:44 Haha, my calculus teacher talked endlessly about FLT. It's always a treat to learn a bit more math to understand the process of finding it.
This is some of the best content I have ever seen on this website. Please keep it up! And thank you!
16:05 One easy way for people to visualize the conversion of numbers from one base to another could be how they are represented as binary(basically base 2). So just instead of how we can easily convert binary(base 2) to denary(base 10) we can convert other bases into denary pretty easily without having to complicate it. I don't have many views on this point tho as I am just a student who just about nearly started learning about computer science.
I had a professor who went over some of this stuff and I felt like I understood it well enough to accept it, but could never re-explain it to anyone else, at least not in a convincing manner; it almost always ended in arguments (lol). You have an excellent way of explaining it and using visual aids to step through it. Thanks!
Also, curious, is "10-adic" synonymous with "base10"? I've never heard "10-adic" before this video, always "base x".
When talking about base 10 it only has to do with how we represent numbers as strings of digits, this is purely cosmetic and has no effect on the underlying structure.
When talking 10-adic numbers the choice of 10 does affect the underlying structure, it is mathematically different than talking about 2-adic for example.
Generally it is most natural to represent p-adic numbers in base p.
So p-adic (usually) implies base p but a number being in base p does not mean that it is a p-adic number, it could be a real number represented in base p instead.
Expanding on this a bit, as Derek has proven, the statement "x(x-1)=0 implies x=0 or 1" is true for the real numbers no matter which base you write it in. However, this is not true for 10-adic numbers. This speaks to the "cosmetic" and "structure" @entropie-3622 was referring to.
This video is the perfect example of encouraging the audience to rise to the level of the content (the exact opposite of talking down to the audience.) Very inspiring.
It’s comforting to me that there are people out there that understand this stuff. It’s not me…but I’m glad they exist.
Subtract the subject matter from my attention span and you get a p-atic number
Repent and believe in Jesus Christ didn't you watch the video? If you had an infinitely loving being that loved one more person it would become murderous. Explains a lot, actually.
Wait the first part he said can't be right..yoibcantnget 1/3 by multiplyojgna bunch of numbers greater than 1 by 3. That will necessarily be much greater than 1. Why did he say this then when it's clearly wrong?
@Leif 3:26, It would be wrong if you ever stopped writing any digits to the left, but as long as that sequence of numbers is infinite, that makes all leading decimal places zero. Carrying from the one's place to the tenth's place, to the hundred's etc. are all finite operations which match your intuition. You could imagine it as "carrying the leftover numbers to the the infinite's place". --That's a bit of a non-sensical phrase since there is no infinite's place, but the point is there are no leftover that actually contribute to the finite number you get as an answer. There is no higher value decimal place that isn't just a leading zero.
I'm not sure if it is "technically" legal for our most common number system to even mix an infinity (...666667) with a finite (3), but if you accept that premise and follow along with him anyways, it actually shows how you can discover a new number system which acts as a NEW self consistent mathematical model with amazing implications and practical applications.
Fantastic video. Thank you so much for your work, keep them coming.
Most of the numbers we deal with are really just an edge condition. As a programmer solutions to problems usually have values that are on the edges and have to be tested for specifically.
Would be interested in a video about perfectoid spaces. Great content. Keep it up!
amazing that content like this is available for free. Not that your other videos aren't great as well, but this was something else.
Are p-adic numbers used for calculations in quantum computers? Btw I'm very impressed how complex mathematics could be. Never heard of anything like this before. Even more impressive is that even the ancient greeks already thought about it!
I couldn't imagine someone could do a youtube video on this topic. Complete with graphics and engaging commentary. It takes a very special level of film making skill plus top notch scientific knowledge to do such a thing. I am a phd in maths. At one time sixteen years back, i was entranced by p-adics. Used to organize student level lectures on it. Slowly my interest wore off and i moved on.
Thanks for reminding those days again.
if you want maths topics with graphics and engaging commentary, I'd reccomend 3blue1brown
Yes I have viewed 3blue 1brown on several topics. So wish Clip-Share was functioning when I was much younger. I watch now with a badly damaged brain (bacterial meningitis with 2 strokes in 2005). I follow only somewhat. I miss my capabilities prior to this event. But reaching and stretching helps loss at a slower rate.
The most amazing thing is that there was no film involved ;)
@Druskee lol ... I mean movie making, ... Writing, dialogues, camera placement, post production, editing, graphics, etc. I have great respect for people who are good at this. My efforts in this have proved to be laughing stocks.
As far as I can see, Derek is an unique person who combines movie making skill with scientific aptitude to such perfection. His videos about relativistic effects of electric current are ample proof.
@RTA Gaming could you link/give the title of that very video?
There are various branches of math which at first glance, even after being shown the proof, are almost unbelievable.
Thank you, that gave me some insights in how a set of numbers can help to solve other problems. But watching this first time on Sunday morning was brutal. :-)
This video is an excellent insight into how my mind works. Please continue making such beautiful videos about numbers.
Once again, this is the best content on the internet. Thank you for sharing with us!
I liked math in school since i liked puzzles but this video had me enthralled like nothing before this is literally 3D math
This is weirdly similar to the way computers (typically) encode negative integers using 2's complement notation, where ...1111 (in binary) is how you represent -1. In computers this works because you run out of bits eventually and the carry gets thrown away. That's functionally the same as the digits just going on forever, so computers are kind of using 2-adic integers. Neat!
I know that computers use negative numbers like that. But now I understand why it works.
that what I was thinking and I don't get any of this actually - happy to see my unconcious getting it
yes, that works the same way (although on computer you are generally limited to 32 bits or 64 bits)
that's what I said! this reminds me of the fast square root solution! its almost like a p-adic solution in constrained bit depth
Who would have thought that overflow errors exist in real life 😅
I am someone who can't stand maths. But it's not because of maths, it's because of the school system. I find videos like this fascinating and I like watching them. Since I left school, I enjoy watching them even more. And it turns out that I don't suck at maths as much as I used to get taught. There just weren't any topics that interested me.
What topics in Maths interest you?
This is so true. I am in school… it’s not that maths itself is boring it’s just the school system.
Outstanding video. Thank you for the effort of simplifying this.
hey Derek, could you do a video about Artificial Intelligence trying to uncover some internal pieces of language models? As i see it its something very related to your areas of knowledge and you would totally nail it!
Derek, I always enjoy your content and your presentation skills, no matter where the subject takes us. In this case I understood every single word you said, and the illustrations and examples seemed straightforward and logical. But for the first time, I don’t have the slightest clue what you’re talking about or what it all means. But thanks! I think. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
I can’t focus for 5 mins at school but can watch a full 30 minutes video from you no problem
Lol
This is something you choose to do, school isn't
Prob because you knows that you're gonna learn smth that you actually wants to know about, rather than listening to random shits that your teacher's gonna teach you ;-;
It's probably all the answers before and also probably because this channel has a better teacher than the one at your school. I felt the same when I was in school as well and realized that quite a few of my teachers were just not right for me
You can't . This 30 video was uploaded 10 mins ago, and clearly you didn't watch it for 30 minutes before coming to the comments, ie lost your focus .
The random injection of a mildly overly enthusiastic mathematician is the icing on the cake of this video. 😂. I like him. Hope to see more of him.
Derek keep going, your videos are very interesting and useful! :)
I work in computer science, and in watching this video, I realized that computers store integer quantities using a similar strategy in a binary string, only for a finite string (since you can't store an infinite amount of data). Typical integers are stored in 32 or 64 bit registers (there is also a short int, or integer, that is only 2 bytes or 16 bit registers). The first register is usually reserved as the 'sign bit', but for all intense and purposes, this can be considered as the overflow register to assume up to infinity for the purposes of this discussion. For illustration purposes, let's assume only 8 bit registers with the first being a sign bit and the remaining being the magnitude part. Each bit from the right to the left represents a power of 2, with the right most being on the order of 2⁰ * (0 or 1).
0 would be: 0 | 000 0000
1 would be: 0 | 000 0001
2 would be: 0 | 000 0010
127 would be: 0 | 111 1111 (the maximum positive signed integer value that can be stored in a singly byte, or 8 bit registers)
However, adding just 1 more to this value would roll this result and would yield:
0 | 111 1111
0 | 000 0001
--------------------
1 | 000 0000 (the minimum negative value possible, -128 in this case)
Similarly, subtracting a value n from 0 rolls the sign bit to reveal the negative integer representation of that n magnitude (it 'magically' barrows a '2', or a binary 10, from the next order from the 'infinity' beyond the sign bit range):
0 | 000 0000 (0)
0 | 000 0001 (1)
--------------------
1 | 111 1111 (-1)
0 | 000 0000 (0)
0 | 000 0110 (6)
---------------------
1 | 111 1010 (-6)
This same methodology extends out to Short Int (2 byte), (Normal) Int (4 byte), and Long Int (8 byte), just with a lot more bit registers available and allowing for a much greater range in integer numbers.
Bonus, binary is already a base-2 counting system that makes it a P-adic by default.
Wow, I am amazed by the quality of the content, and the presentation is top notch!
I started understanding this when I started thinking about binary. It makes so much sense now, it's not the exact same but it's the idea
This feels eerily similar to how negative numbers are stored in computers: using 2's compliment. You sort of touched on this with the 9's compliment but basically the larger the number is the closer to zero it is from the negative side. When computer memory overflows it flips from signifying the largest possible positive value to signifying the largest possible negative value. As you increase further your values become less and less negative until you overflow again (this time for real) and get back to 0.
These p-adic numbers almost feel like we overflow infinity and go back to negatives / fractions.🤯
Having a computer science background I immediately thought "the structure of universe has an integer overflow problem!"
@David Durant Bro me too
Unhandled Exception: "Mind" is missing
Also though this will eventual lead to 2’s complement arithmetic, but didn’t(
Doesn’t it feel spiritual too? This sort of look at the numbers and take mods of numbers has been a numerology thing for as long as I’ve seen it. The whole thing where the final digits mean larger adjustments than the previous ones implies an inflection point somewhere maybe. Say a number that’s written out as 11111……11111. What could it be used for? Or one that’s -11111….1111. Would that even make sense? A “non dual” number, that is both positive and negative. Or what if we had a third sign other than +-, like # or something. I’m no expert but love thinking abt it
A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon a very similar concept reading about how computers (binary in nature, o 2-adic I guess) divide numbers. Just like the number 12 = 2x10^0 + 1x10^1, the number 0,12 = 1x10^-1 + 2x10^-2. And “the same” can be done in binary, placing a decimal place at the leftmost position, and then having the bits represent negative powers of two. The mind blowing discovery was that fractions that were not periodic in base 10 (like 1/10) were periodic in base 2 (and this happens since 10 isn’t a power of 2). This made me think that there could be infinitely many number systems in which the fractions that were periodic were entirely different. Fascinating
Personally, I think that the fact that p-adic numbers works is less crazy than complex numbers.
The quality of these videos is insanely high. Thank you very much!
This has a lot of similarities to binary math (2 is a prime so..). But this has a lot of parallels in e.g. fixed point notation for binary numbers, which is kind of cool. Only difference I guess is that we don't have an infinite number of bits
6:34 this sent me on a whole train of thought about two's and one's complement in binary math (I'm a programmer) so I realized pretty quickly that what you are describing here is a ten's complement.
one's complement: NOT n (not meaning to invert all the digits, i.e. subtract them from 1)
two's complement: NOT n + 1
Say you have a number with an unknown number of bits, but you know that the last 4 bits are 1011 and every bit to the left is a 1. Whether the number is 4, 8, 16, 32, 64-bit, or even an odd configuration like 11-bit, the number, so long as it falls in this pattern, could be interpreted as a signed integer, and its negative representation is found via two's complement. So you invert the digits, turning it into a number with all 0's ending in 0100 (4 base 10), and then adding 1 to get 5. Therefore, the number, no matter how many bits it has, is representing -5. there is also one's complement, which omits the last step, but it is wasteful because you end up with two zeros.
Take a 4-bit number, for example. In a 4-bit number, you can represent the values [0, 15] unsigned, or [-8, +7] signed (2's complement). You can test this out yourself by writing a column with all 16 permutations of 4 bits (0000, 0001, ... 1111, you can figure it out) and their signed and unsigned decimal representations in columns to make a table. Use what I told you above, like 1011 being -5, and extend the pattern until you have the positives and negatives meet in the middle. You will find that once you hit 1000, the sign bit has been flipped and you get your first negative number, -8 (which happens to be -(2^(n-1))), and that -1 is the number with all 1's right before it wraps back around to 0 (all 0's). Using 1's complement, that all 1's number is "negative zero", which is a useless value, and you lose your -8 instead getting a range [-7, +7]. This pattern extends to 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. signed 2's complement numbers also have cool properties, like the fact that you can just add them together without having to do anything special and integer overflow will ensure that you get the correct answer, meaning you can implement subtraction by just 2's complementing the number being subtracted (invert all its digits and add 1) and then adding them together. 5 - 1 can be implemented as 5 + (-1) or 5 + NOT 1 + 1, or in our 4-bit representation, 0101 + 1111 which equals 10100 (20 unsigned), but since we only have 4 bits the leftmost bit is truncated (integer overflow) and we end up with 0100, which is 4, which is indeed the correct answer to 5 - 1. Signed integers are not so cool when you're working in a programming language like C where signed overflow is undefined and breaks your programs because you can't guarantee what the compiler will do, but that's a different matter dealing with human standards and technology compatibility.
But yeah, I have some experience with p-adic numbers. 2-adic mostly.
learning about math without the pressure of college is pretty nice. i still feel completely lost after a certain point but the crushing pressure of needing to pass the class and putting stress on myself doesn't exist
I think that financial pressures have changed the college experience from an exploration of the full wonder of truth into a race to the narrow, utilitarian set of truths prescribed by the heartless needs of the employer class.
I don't want to be a machine for some owner's wealth accumulation. I want to explore the beauty of truth for its own sake.
@BradyPostma This is a better description of "escaping the matrix" than anything else I've heard.
Just what I have been thinking about for a long time; Thank you for sharing your opinion to the world ❤
The ChatGPT stuff will defiantly help in Pedagogy/Teaching even at high levels; it's like having a pocket TA.
It's amazing to know about p adics. I have had vision or dream about the concept of p adics when I first started calculus, which I have assumed the opposite of Infinitesimal. Indeed I was right, it does exist!
I like it how mathematicians just create weird problems and challenge other mathematicians to solve and expect this will one day be useful for solving real world problems, and they actually do.
The graphic representation really pulled it all together for me. It was hard to understand how we could just ignore all those places to the left.
Mind-opening and inspiring, brilliantly articulated and demonstrated. Marvelous! 👍👏🤛
This was a great video, and it motivates me to pursue research in Mathematics
As a Maths graduate, I really appreciated this being taught so well. I remember learning them for the first time and they looked so counter-intutive at that time.
If you don’t mind me asking, what do people do after they graduate with a degree in mathematics. What will your work in the job be?
Why even bother with intuition in maths ? 😀
@KorigamiK Anything from math research to biology research to investment banking. The last pays more of course. You'll find expertise in math is desired in all sorts of places. There's even math used in the art world, like for image reconstruction.
@KorigamiK If you graduate with undergraduate maths degree you can do almost any job. More importantly you will have enough background for a master in many subjects. However, if you wish to do pure maths further you will end up in academia.
@Le YASEP Intuition is very important in mathematics. They are needed for understanding old mathematics and creating new mathematics.
Thank you so much, it was mind blowing.
I love veritasium, especially the content about math, they are amazing.
Veritasium team, Thank you a thousand times to make a high quality videos, and we can watch it for no financial cost.
as a mathematician, some of your videos are so neat they genuinely disturb me 😂
I have a problem that I don't think is anecdotal to my viewing setup. In this video, on the calculation screens, there seems to be small, repetitive, artificially introduced artifacts in the white background. If this is a technical glitch in your recording setup, hopefully this distraction can be fixed in future videos. Given the quality of your videos, I can't imagine that you would squander so much of your quality and integrity to employ such a manipulative, low-brow tactic. Your videos are top notch, and your channel doesn't need to exploit vulnerabilities in our cognition and nervous system for the sake of prolonging engagement. Even during the simplest of mathematical presentations, I don't think we need artificial forms of stimulation to retain our attention and interest.
So great content time and time again. Thank you so much!
You can find patterns in numbers as long as you are looking for them. You can also make numbers mean anything which just means they mean nothing.
I was deeply fascinated with maths in my younger days, a subject I excelled in and genuinely loved. I went on to become an engineer and now I build software for a living. But every time I come across videos like these, there's this regret, making me wonder why I ever left the beauty of mathematics behind :')
Thanks man for making these videos
It's never too late! I'm in school right now so that once I have my degree I can take classes that interest me. Some of those are going to be mathematics classes.
As a software engineer, I agree with you. Sometimes I want to just whip out the pen and paper and start refreshing on calculus and go into these deeper concepts and ditch my depression generator machine.
@Rinzler D. Vicky eu queria exatamente o contrário. Deixar esses números de lado e ter um emprego como engenheira de software
capitalism is why
@Alex C at least in my country, math majors have one of the highest income expectations
really nice. connected some random bunches of math i had laying arround, like when i played arround desmos and found mod(x) did some funky stuff, and when a teacher explained how the series of product lines usually follow a geometric series. top tier video
You know, this was so funny to me because I got to hear the history and logic behind math that I've been using in programming since high school and now university😆
Even though I'm sure this video only scratches the surface of p-adics, I feel like I've ACTUALLY LEARNED something in half an hour and am inspired to learn moreabout something I previously had no particulr interest in. Thanks!
6 Years ago i started studying Physics. At the end of my First semester and the start of the second one this was included... 6 Years after I first heard about it, I'm finally able to understand it
Thank you so much
I see, this is what I've searching for
A few back, I was trying to find out how to view mathematics as a language and then try to find connections of numers, by adding, subtracting, multiplying, squaring... etc
I'm glad I found this video, thank you VERITASIUM
I used to hate math class in school because I didn't understand it and there was a lot of pressure from teachers to perform well. Now I'm done with school and willfully watch videos about complicated math and enjoy it so much. It is genuinely so interesting to watch these videos, even if I don't understand every single thing. My mind was blown like 20 times throughout this video and my view on math has been turned completely upside down.
You like it because you are not going to get tested.
Fun fact, children who were poorly educated in math have a tendency to become adults who make bad financial decisions. It's almost as if money is made out of numbers or something.
Repent to Jesus Christ ““Honor your father and mother”-which is the first commandment with a promise- “so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.””
Ephesians 6:2-3 NIV
K
@Repent and believe in Jesus Christ Bot
Hi Derek- my son was so excited to see you at WV High today. Thank you for doing what you do!
Can we maybe apply this to the 3X+1 problem where negative numbers have 3 loops.
Kudos to the animator! Very informative and satisfying :D
As an average joe I understood probably less than 1% of this but the way you present makes me keep watching it 😅
Hmmm no one is average 😅😅😅😅