hot-sets

A four-panel comic. In panel one, a young man asks an older bearded man in a toga, "Hey Plato, do you think numbers have real existence?" Plato replies, "Yes." In panel two the young man argues, "But that means I can arbitrarily create stupid sets of numbers. Like 'the set containing all the rational numbers plus a picture of an elephant's dong.'" In panel three the young man gestures excitedly: "According to your view, the 'R+D set' must be 'out there' in the universe. I can literally fill the universe with dongs!" In panel four Plato, unimpressed and pointing a finger, says, "This is ancient Greece, bro. We put up more dongs than doorknobs. Your critique is meaningless!" The young man, taken aback, replies, "Who was critiquing?" The joke: the man tries to use a deliberately absurd, obscene set to mock Platonism, but Plato shrugs it off because phalluses were everywhere in ancient Greece anyway. Votey (an after-comic panel): handwritten text reads, "The elephant dong is expressed via any sufficiently large exchange matrix" — a mock-mathematical statement framing the elephant dong as a linear-algebra object.