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Yet Another Cantor Crank
I get a fair bit of mail from crackpots. The category that I find most annoying is the Cantor cranks. Over and over and over again, these losers send me their “proofs”. What bugs me so much about this...
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There's always more Cantor crackpottery!
I’m not the only one who gets mail from crackpots! A kind reader forwarded me yet another bit of Cantor crackpottery. It never ceases to amaze me how many people virulently object to Cantor, and how...
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For every natural number N, there's a Cantor Crank C(n)
More crankery? of course! What kind? What else? Cantor crankery! It’s amazing that so many people are so obsessed with Cantor. Cantor just gets under peoples’ skin, because it feels wrong. How can...
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Genius Continuum Crackpottery
This post was revised on June 25, 2014. Mr. Wince has been threatening to sue me for libel. I don’t think that that’s right, but one thing that he’s complained about is correct. I called him a high...
View ArticleSpeed-Crankery
A fun game to play with cranks is: how long does it take for the crank to contradict themselves? When you’re looking at a good example of crankery, it’s full of errors. But for this game, it’s not...
View ArticleInfinite Cantor Crankery
I recently got yet another email from a Cantor crank. Sadly, it’s not a particularly interesting letter. It contains an argument that I’ve seen more times than I can count. But I realized that I don’t...
View ArticleYet Another Cantor Crank: Size vs Cardinality
Over the weekend, a reader sent me links to not one but two new Cantor cranks! Sadly, one of them is the incoherent sort – the kind of nutjob who strings together words in meaningless ways. Without a...
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Bad Math Books and Cantor Cardinality
A bunch of readers sent me a link to a tweet this morning from Professor Jordan Ellenberg: If you're writing a math textbook and you're not sure you understand a piece of math, just don't include it....
View ArticleCantor Crankery is Boring
Sometimes, I think that I’m being punished. I’ve written about Cantor crankery so many times. In fact, it’s one of the largest categories in this blog’s index! I’m pretty sure that I’ve covered pretty...
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Why we need formality in mathematics
The comment thread from my last Cantor crankery post has continued in a way that demonstrates a common issue when dealing with bad math, so I thought it was worth taking the discussion and promoting...
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