mathstodon.xyz is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A Mastodon instance for maths people. We have LaTeX rendering in the web interface!

Server stats:

2.9K
active users

Christian Lawson-Perfect

Just spent half an hour with my summer student getting into the subtleties of the conditions required for "throwing two dice" to have 36 possible outcomes.
I came up with a good example: I'm colourblind, so if we throw a red and a green die at the same time, the student can distinguish them, but I can't. So the outcomes are a property of the observer, not the trial itself.

@christianp I suppose, that makes sense, but even a colorblind observer could determine the color of the die with the right tools. I feel like the important lesson isn't so much that it depends on the observer, but that you get to pick the model to isolate and accentuate the features of the problem that you want to study. My favorite example is the seven bridges problem: you have to *say* that swimming/flying/boating/teleporting isn't allowed.