What is the cleverest proof?
You are currently reading a thread in /sci/ - Science & Math
I refer to proofs that are at most one page long, but are extremely clever.
The cleverest I've encountered is Kleene's recursion theorem.
>>7952066
certainly the remarkable proof by the eminent Barnett that the sum of natural numbers is actually a negative one!
Some simple classic proofs are ofcours the infinitute of primes and the irrationality of the sqaure root of 2.
Best proofs are the ones that are frustratingly simple.
>>7952626
I wasn't going to mention these, happily someone else did.
Gödel's clever bit about his incompleteness theorems was to semantically equate natural-numbers, their strings, and the finite logical statements to which they corresponded.
>>7952626
>infinitute of primes
>tfw had to prove this on my test this week
Bernstein-Schroder proof is bredy gud