this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
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Posts and discussion about the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Hugo Award-winning author Zach Weinersmith (and related works)
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New comics posted whenever they get posted on the site, and old comics posted every day until we catch up in a decade or so
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Wait... If you add all the numbers together, don't you get 0? Since for every number you're also adding the negative.
Technically (not really) sum of all positive integers results in -1/12, which is due to the nature of infinite series and MATH I no longer understand. So it stands to reason, that if you add a -1 multiplier and sum results of both series together, you would get 0! Approximately.
I also can't remember the maths, but iirc the -1/12 value is based on a faulty assumption somewhere in the calculation (probably dividing by 0 at some point)
The faulty assumption in the more naive approach was treating operations on infinite series in the same way you would treat operations on finite sums. The order of elements being added is important, as it does change the series, and the naive approach based on putting 0 in between each numbers like 0 + 1 + 0 + 2 + ... which was incorrect. There are ways to prove it does sum up to -1/12 from what I remember though, it's just the addition of 0's that's bad.