There's a difference between being able to memorize what a square root is and being able to do math - which to mathematicians means being able to organize a proof.

I've found that the people who most believe in math being a genetic ability are the ones who do not work in the symbolic world of modern math, but in the semantic world of whatever the field the math describes is.

The two are rather different.

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Tainnor 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

Square roots are not some "mathematical trivia", they're amongst the most fundamental operations in mathematics.

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llm_trw 8 months ago | parent [-]

In arithmetic. There is a lot more to math than arithmetic.

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Tainnor 8 months ago | parent [-]

Square roots are fundamental to (real and complex) analysis and to algebra (in the study of polynomials), so the two major branches of modern mathematics.

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llm_trw 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

They are fundamental to the arithmetic used in analysis and algebra.

One can get along quite well without them once you replace the arithmetic expressions with more general objects.

	▲	Tainnor 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		Just come on. The square root of 2 is the easiest example of an irrational number, this has been known since Ancient Greece. You can't compute distances in Euclidean spaces without the square root. "Solving equations by roots" is the bread and butter of algebra. Adjoining roots to a field is how you get Galois Theory. Several algorithms related to number theory have complexity O(sqrt(n)). And so on. You chose an extremely poor example and now you're trying to die on that hill. Please don't die on that hill.

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anticensor 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Also fundamental to geometry (pythagorean equation and others).

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tgv 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Strangely enough, you'd be hard pressed to find a mathematician who doesn't know what a square root is.

And I didn't mention genetics. Nature is complicated.

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llm_trw 8 months ago | parent [-]

You'd also be hard pressed to find one who doesn't know how to flush a toilet.

Neither trivia has anything to do with being good at mathematics as done by mathematicians.

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tgv 8 months ago | parent [-]

Are you an LLM? You brought up the point of mathematicians not knowing what a square root is yourself. Anyway, the square root is is so many levels below maths as done by mathematicians, it's laughable.

	▲	blharr 8 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Pretty sure you followed the thread wrong. They only mentioned the square root in response to you?
	▲	wholinator2 8 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It certainly is suspicious that their name starts, "llm"