this came up in review audit which I failed. IMHO this lacks context and opinion based. And I have given my vote based on same. Audit questions should not be selected via number of upvotes, but by looking at their content.
Also observe that there is no feedback by asker, profile is from 8 years and no activity apart from this question.
@user21820 To their credit, the numberphile people followed up the original -1/12 video (which indeed highlights the dangers of an enthusiastic person expositing with insufficient context) with a second one that had an actual mathematician explaining it well (i thought.). And I have seen some of their episodes with real mathematicians that were actually quite good. so they're not all bad...
@rschwieb They are not all bad, but it's like the tragic hero, with one flaw enough to be looked down upon. That one particular video caught the fancy of many more people than it ought to, due to the outrageous conclusion and the fancy use of infinite sums and manipulations of these. It has gone on to figure in blogs and other videos and many questions here. Despite canonical answers here, those questions don't stop coming.
@user21820 i haven't been keeping track of their topics. if they've been doing better on the whole, I'd not be inclined to 'cancel' them like that. wonder how much money they make on their channel...
@rschwieb Not just those videos actually. There's division by zero videos, showing $1=2$ by secret division by $0$ and so on. Then there's videos on what is the dirac delta function intuitively, and the idea of being infinite at zero creates doubts. So we have to face the music when people watch these videos and come here and say : "I smell something wrong" or "what if I did this instead" or something else outlandish. Pragmatism must precede flight of fancy on this site.
@rschwieb I don't know what you're talking about. Their video in Jan 2014 was just nonsense. Their second video in Mar 2014 was still very misleading to the point that I would say it's still wrong; he asks what if we can cut away ∞ (from ∞) leaving a finite part. What nonsense! He even says it pops up in mathematics and quantum physics, which is blatantly FALSE. The third video in Jan 2015 is nonsense too.
I don't believe any of the regularization rubbish, much less string theory, any more than spaghetti-monster theory.
@rschwieb I don't put the blame on Numberphile at all, after all they do inspire people to talk about "mathematics" and then move into the rigorous discipline, but the problem is that there are too many videos, not just from NP but that try to either "break" mathematics or "intuit" deep mathematics using physical ideas. While the intentions are right, the tremors of people's imagination are felt only here!
@amWhy @user21820 That one is in the history books.
@user21820 I don't have an opinion on the parts about infinity in the March 2014 video, and so I may lack the confidence to reject the thing outright, but what I thought they redeemed themselves with was getting into the discussion of how there are multiple ways of assigning a value to an infinite series (which was the context that went unsaid in the earlier video.)
I suppose it's also entirely possible they didn't redeem themselves and what I saw was on a different youtube channel ;)
@rschwieb There are in fact other channels that criticized Numberphile, so who knows? =)
@TeresaLisbon I'm actually very doubtful that they had pure intentions. They seem to me to simply want to become popular. And we all know what tickles is rarely the hard truth.
@user21820 Possible, in fact quite probable now that I think of it. It's like a politician bringing up an issue that will certainly elicit controversy.
and thus attract attention. It worked, resoundingly!
@user21820 I think this conversation has largely been respectful and conciliatory. You may have your hunches, and may have reason to believe them. But please be careful in how you come across, close to shaming others. We may agree there are problems there, but there is no need to keep driving in an axe. Particularly when addressing others' intentions, you may overstep what makes for honest communication.
@user21820 As a mathematician, I've become skeptical to the point where only true results can tickle me and not flights of imagination, which I know can come crashing. There are a few, but the one I love the most is called the Filippov Wazewski relaxation theorem, which is a density result for functions with constrained derivative (solutions of differential inclusions).
Nobody will take this stuff up on Youtube, though. They'll get about 50 views, probably because 25 people will each view it from their phone and their laptop.
@TeresaLisbon Hahaha... there is one quite successful math channel, 3b1b, which I'm sure you know, but it's still quite unknown, partly because it's pitched at people who are already interested in mathematics.
@TeresaLisbon @user21820 It would be interesting for CURED to start a youtube channel or other channel, on which we discuss the merits and dismerits of questions and answers posted on math.se!
@user21820 The 1+2+3+... - equation HAS caused immense damage, and we must have the right to point that out. Nothing, really nothing good came from this misleading video. There is no reason to defend it in any way. Anyway, the merit of numberphile videos is more than debatable.
@Peter I am not supporting numberphile. I did not take kindly to the shaming of a user here. Let it go. Nothing shuts down conversation more than "My arguments and my perspective is impeccable."
I've always rather liked preaching to the choir, though. In all of the Christian churches I've been in, the choir is up front, either next to or behind the preacher. Thus preaching to the choir requires that one turn their back on the rest of the congregation.
Unfortunately, too much conversation goes on between like-minded folks, (who consider themselves all like minded) on all sides of an issue, making it difficult for most to learn how to converse with those who see things differently. But ironically, it's often the case that those who one thinks are "like minded", may not in fact be, and those we think are not like us often turn out to be sincerely in agreement of values and priorities...
@TeresaLisbon, @RRL, @rschwieb, @JyrkiLahtonen, @KReiser, please see the Cafe to help search for words with four or more letters from letters in WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
@amWhy Nice! My grandmother has her birthday on International Women's day so 8th March is never forgotten. I did not know there was a whole month! I'm coming!
@user21820 3blue1brown is a nice channel, I would not mind if people came here asking for clarifications from those videos.
@rschwieb Agreed, I think 3blue1brown does a far better job than other fellows in providing mainly geometric intuition.
@RRL Delete vote on each of them. Once again, high rep users with the usual answering nonsense. I see how short and specific each of their answers are, and I'm boggled each time. The questions are also very localized, and that forces short localized answers, which can't be made dupe targets in the future and three different answers end up overlapping as well.
The weirdest one has to be this one an answer which says "this needs more context" is right up there.
