Timeline for Is there a high-concept explanation for why characteristic 2 is special?
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4 events
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| Mar 21, 2014 at 19:51 | comment | added | Torsten Schoeneberg | (cont'd) indeed 3, 4 and 6 are exceptional numbers when it comes to matters of seabed-tiling, and the speciality of 5 is just that it's the first of the non-weird numbers (except for 2, but hey, what straight starfish cares about 2?). - Then some will say that exactly this shows the weirdness of 5 (if not the supremacy of starfishdom), but others will reply that, you know the paradox, there is no smallest non-interesting number, and every number looks weird when you look at it long enough. But still, it makes a curious starfish wonder, some things calmly tile the sea floor and others don't ... | |
| Mar 21, 2014 at 19:49 | comment | added | Torsten Schoeneberg | Certainly if starfish had a god, he'd have five sides (misquoting Montesquieue). And certainly when they need a tiling of the seabed, they will soon proclaim that 5 is indeed a weird prime, and some will state that the mentioned god chose it to not allow them to fill the floor. But then there are some of them who meditate in their spare time and realise that if their symmetries were more of order 2 or 3 -- like in some of the primitive species they observe -- they would have better chances to do so. And some of them will play with the thought that ... | |
| Jun 30, 2010 at 11:21 | comment | added | Mariano Suárez-Álvarez | I was about to post a similarly spirited answer, adorned with the observation that I think that 2 looks as special as it does because we have so far concentrated mainly in studying situations where it is special (quadratic stuff), not because they are the only ones of interest but because they are the ones we can deal with. Other primes do already show up in very peculiar ways when dealing with certain types of objects (an example is Lie theory, where 3 is also special) and I would not be surprised if this would occur more often in the future in other areas. IOW, starfish are smarter than us. | |
| Jun 30, 2010 at 11:04 | history | answered | Tom Goodwillie | CC BY-SA 2.5 |