[Answered] who can prove that 1 > 0 ?

[Cashmoney995]

Originally posted by: Krakerjak
common sense

This man has the answer to all of our questions.

 

[ZeroNine8]

there are a lot of things that do not follow 'common sense' or intuition, so that answer doesn't always hold water.

 

[Replicon]

This is a result that follows from the fundamental theorem of hand-waving

 

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: LurchFrinky
First of all, thank you RossGr for showing us what tart666 meant to say.

tart,

If you notice from Ross's post, he had to use definitions for ordered fields and sets, along with definitions for >,<, and -(x). None of these were present in your original post. His proof also contains the statement "if x>0", which is a pretty important assumption.

The arguments by Peter and others weren't that it was impossible, it's that you were leaving out some pretty important bits.

I agree... You said to prove it, "using the following". There was no way to prove it with that restriction.

For those whining about how senseless this thread is, you simply don't understand it, and probably wouldn't understand the importance without a few more years of mathematics. Mathematics is based on as few rules as possible, and everything is built up from there and proved, starting with the basic rules.

Common sense/intuition isn't one of the rules, because common sense sometimes fails. Example: What has more points on it, a 1 inch line segment or a 2 inch line segment? (They both have infinitely many points) But, does the longer line segment have a bigger value of infinitely many points? The answer to that is NO! (goes against common sense.) And, I could show you a mapping that would prove that for each and every point on the longer segment, there exists exactly 1 unique point on the shorter line segment. Related question, is infinity always the same size of infinity? The answer, again, is NO.

 

[drag]

So you would agree that 1 is more then Zero would just be one of those very few fundamental rules that make up mathmatics?

 

[Peter]

Well, I do. But we are being ignored here

 

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: drag
So you would agree that 1 is more then Zero would just be one of those very few fundamental rules that make up mathmatics?

Even if you make that one of the rules, some of the other rules are still necessary. By not making that a rule, you've decreased the number of necessary rules, and instead prove that 1>0.

Nonetheless, I completely agree with you. (and, I'm not sure which are the most basic rules that all the rest of the rules rely upon; except that I do know that the basic assumptions can change depending on which area of mathematics you're in. Read about Godel's proof... fairly interesting related to this topic.