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Greg Kuperberg
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Here are four tempting fallacies that I have seen, that are in my opinion are all teachable and interesting:

  1. A finite covering space of a disk with finitely many holes, is again a disk with finitely many holes; in particular it is still planar.

  2. If you lengthen all three edges of a triangle, its area increases.

  3. If $F$ is a field with two finite-index subfields $K$ and $L$, then $K \cap L$ also has finite index in $F$.

  4. There are exactly two Lie groups up to isomorphism that are diffeomorphic to a pair of circles.

Greg Kuperberg
  • 56.6k
  • 10
  • 203
  • 282