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posted by CoolHand on Saturday July 25 2015, @08:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the beautiful-mind dept.

The New York Times published an article in its magazine about one of the greatest mathematicians living today, Terry Tao. The first paragraph should whet one's appetite for the rest of the article:

This April, as undergraduates strolled along the street outside his modest office on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, the mathematician Terence Tao mused about the possibility that water could spontaneously explode. A widely used set of equations describes the behavior of fluids like water, but there seems to be nothing in those equations, he told me, that prevents a wayward eddy from suddenly turning in on itself, tightening into an angry gyre, until the density of the energy at its core becomes infinite: a catastrophic ‘‘singularity.’’ Someone tossing a penny into the fountain by the faculty center or skipping a stone at the Santa Monica beach could apparently set off a chain reaction that would take out Southern California.

There are some people who are just too smart, and this guy is one of them.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2015, @08:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2015, @08:14AM (#213774)

    When is he going to explain how he thinks water could possibly maybe someday one day explode? It's in the article.

    It's horseshit plain and simple and many "pure math" bums have ran this and other scams for far too long.

    Don't defend them. They love the press enough to defend themselves when it comes to funding.

    Yes they know the press butchers info and they still don't dictate the terms?

    It's not by accident. It's called CYA.

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday July 26 2015, @06:10PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 26 2015, @06:10PM (#213923) Journal

    If you want the explanation, read the math. The English is merely a very rough translation of what the math is saying.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.