There are both joys and frustrations entering the field of mathematics without any previous formal mathematical training. I worked all day today to prove my own conjecture, and part of the proof required expanding m summands to the n-th power. I didnt know, or had forgotten, that there is a standard way to do this, and I spent an hour deriving a formula, and the end of which I discovered that I had just independently rediscovered Pascals triangle and the method of obtaining binomial coefficients from it...... A few weeks ago, I thought I had made a discovery in number theory, in which I took the product of the first n primes, and found that adding 1 always seemed to yield yet another prime. (I did know, of course, that there is no known formula to enumerate the primes, so this result was extremely shocking to me!) But then I found the number 30031, which is the first number in this set that is *not* prime. I really thought I was onto something, but then I googled 30031 and found that I had just rediscovered Euclid numbers, specifically that I had found the first Euclid number that is itself not prime. This keeps happening, and part of me is happy to have discovered results that are known to be valid, but its also extremely frustrating because if I only had formal training, I would already know all the known results and I could be solving actual open problems! Time to get to studying.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 01:31:06 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015