strings
Original: strings on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
Man: The proof of Riemann's hypothesis is trivial.
Panel 2:
Man: Step then. Write it down and claim your fields medal.
Girl (a blonde child): I don't have the solution -- that's the point. I'm just saying the solution is trivial.
Panel 3:
Man: Think about the space of all possible proofs. There are infinite proofs. All of which are just stepping of little squiggles. It follows that there's some point where there is some other proof that is both longer and has more complicated squiggles.
Panel 4:
Man: Since "triviality" is always a relative quality you can make a proof trivial just by looking a harder one. Thus relative to that one, the original proof is trivial. And thus we have shown that all proofs are trivial, including this one.
Girl: That seems... non-obvious.
Panel 5:
Man (standing on a cliff, gesturing across to another cliff): Actually everything is obvious.
Votey:
The one downside is that the answer is approximately infinity characters in length.
Man: The proof of Riemann's hypothesis is trivial.
Panel 2:
Man: Step then. Write it down and claim your fields medal.
Girl (a blonde child): I don't have the solution -- that's the point. I'm just saying the solution is trivial.
Panel 3:
Man: Think about the space of all possible proofs. There are infinite proofs. All of which are just stepping of little squiggles. It follows that there's some point where there is some other proof that is both longer and has more complicated squiggles.
Panel 4:
Man: Since "triviality" is always a relative quality you can make a proof trivial just by looking a harder one. Thus relative to that one, the original proof is trivial. And thus we have shown that all proofs are trivial, including this one.
Girl: That seems... non-obvious.
Panel 5:
Man (standing on a cliff, gesturing across to another cliff): Actually everything is obvious.
Votey:
The one downside is that the answer is approximately infinity characters in length.
Alt text
A five-panel comic. A man insists to a blonde child that the proof of Riemann's hypothesis is trivial. When she points out he doesn't actually have the proof, he launches into a convoluted argument: across the infinite space of all possible proofs, there is always some longer, more complicated proof, and since triviality is relative, any proof is trivial when compared to a harder one -- therefore all proofs are trivial. The child replies, "That seems... non-obvious." In the final panel the man stands on a cliff and declares, "Actually everything is obvious." Votey (aftercomic): a single panel of text reading, "The one downside is that the answer is approximately infinity characters in length."
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.