this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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And that -1/12 bs is why I cannot math.
1+2+3 ... tends toward infinity and there's no amount of playing with numbers will convince me otherwise.
it's not actually math. It's people coming up with alternative definitions and then feeling smug when their alternative definitions give weird results.
It literally is math tho
Yeah because these weird definitions might be useful in some other context.
Like robbing a bartender. Or your 401(k).
None of those contexts include ordering a number of beers
But that's literally the joke in the meme tho
Ostensibly it's used a lot in quantum physics
That's all that math is about.
It's really not.
Also, here's a video on why that -1/12 stuff is pretty much nonsense:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YuIIjLr6vUA
1+2+3… absolutely diverges to infinity. In order to get the -1/12 result you have to explicitly suspend the normal rules governing math in very specific ways. Some YouTubers for clickbait effect pretend that you are not suspending the rules to get that result. However, suspending the rules in the ways that allow for -1/12 demonstrates all these patterns that are also cool if you are a big enough nerd to think number manipulation like that is cool.
i stop at 0.999... == 1 thanks :)
Hello, I play with numbers:
Moral of the story: ones together are nothing.
Thank you for your attention.
let me hand you a tissue, looks like you got some 'stuff' in your text box
Much appreciated. 🤧
lol 1-1, 2-2 etc.
How do you get 1 + 2-1?
You need to distribute that minus sign to all numbers in the sequence. You can’t leave off the first one.
It's an infinite series, love, I just moved it, there are still enough elements in them because, well, they are infinite. If you are so sad about it, write the second one as
0-S, changes nothing but now you have a donut to pair up with the1in the first series.He has a plus one, and a minus one, a plus two, and a minus two, and so on. This is analogous to how conditionally convergent series can be modified to give any finite (or infinite) sum merely by changing the order of the terms.