Actually, the Numberphile video is notorious for lacking mathematical rigor. Mathologer did a video on it. IMO, it’s really really important to explain the difference between what’s going on here (assigning a number to a divergent series) and what we ordinarily do (computing the limit of a sequence of partial sums).
There was a full on mathematical war on YouTube, with numberphile coming back later to show that most partial sum methods also end up at -1/12.
As a science nerd, mathologer basically just took the camp of “old concensus” and gave no other argument than “this is alien math, nope, I don’t like it”. It just felt like mathologer was Pythagoras fighting against irrational numbers…
https://leightonvw.com/2015/02/05/if-you-add-up-all-the-positive-numbers-do-they-sum-to-a-negative-number-yes-they-do/
Feels like a risky click. I’m not sure my worldview can take any more shattering. It’s already shattered I tell you. SHATTERED.
Oh, good. There’s a Numberphile video on it linked at the end. That gives me much better odds of understanding this than just reading the article.
Actually, the Numberphile video is notorious for lacking mathematical rigor. Mathologer did a video on it. IMO, it’s really really important to explain the difference between what’s going on here (assigning a number to a divergent series) and what we ordinarily do (computing the limit of a sequence of partial sums).
There was a full on mathematical war on YouTube, with numberphile coming back later to show that most partial sum methods also end up at -1/12.
As a science nerd, mathologer basically just took the camp of “old concensus” and gave no other argument than “this is alien math, nope, I don’t like it”. It just felt like mathologer was Pythagoras fighting against irrational numbers…
There have been some claims that the numberphile video is very misrepresentative of the underlying math. But I never dug deep enough into it.