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If anyone’s curious, the first step is wrong. e^x minus its integral is a constant. Not necessarily zero.
In step two you can’t gake out e^x from the integral because is being integrated by the x variable.
behold! you have found ze joke
My math degree is only a handful of years old but I don’t do math anymore so I have no clue how horrified I should be
Congrats on finishing your degree
As far as I can tell, every step but the last one is wrong.
Yeah I don’t remember if the result is correct, but the process is definitely sus.
the result is correct
I don’t believe you can just factor our e^x in the second step like that. That seems in incorrect to me. Then again I’ve been out of calculus for years now.
The process is horribly wrong, but the answer is correct. I think that’s the intended joke.
Why’d the (0) vanish? Everything else seems “justified”.
If we already regularly ignore infinities in the self-energy of electrons and other divergent stuff what’s a little division by zero here or there?
Except the first assumption that e^x = its own integral, everything else actually makes sense (except the DX are in the wrong powers). You simply treat the “1” and “integral dx” as operators, formally functions from R^R into R^R and “(0)” as calculating the value of the operator on a constant-valued function 0. EDIT: the step 1/(1-integral) = the limit of a certain series is slightly dubious, but I believe it can be formally proven as well. EDIT 2: I was proven wrong, read the comments
That’s the thing about physicists doing math. They know the universe already works. So if they break some math on the way to an explanation, so what? You can fix math. They care about the universe. It’s pretty cool sometimes. Like bra-ket notation is really an expression the linear algebra concepts of dual space and adjoints. But to a physicist, it’s just how the math should work if it is to do anything useful.
So yeah, this post looks like nonsense. Because it is. But there is a lesson that “math” should work like this, and there is utility in pushing the limits. No pun intended.
Edit: I’m not claiming this is a useful application. It’s circular reasoning as this post’s parent alludes to.
