/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15021192
Why are you even on a science board if you don't understand basic logic or mathematics? It's called an argument ad absurdum. If you're not some sort of tranny SJW, a low IQ normie, or an actual nigger, then you should be familiar with the concept. In mathematics, logic, and science, an argument ad absurdum is when you show that a position or claim is incorrect because it leads to a retarded conclusion that can't be true or which is inconsistent. My post was presenting an argument ad absurdum against this tranny supporter >>15013328.
Again, if you are not nigger or a woke SJW shitlib, then this should not be a difficult concept to understand. If you disagree with me, then you are literally agreeing with the dude who said that trannies are real because of muh brain scans.

I'm pretty sure you're just a retarded shill though, so I'm not going to read your response unless you disavow the Talmud and Zionism. Anyway, you should probably go to plebbit if you're more into pop-sci and you get triggered by subjects like math and logic.

>>14862688
Friedrichs was right but his reasoning was wrong. How does distinguishing between self-adjoint and symmetric operator constitute some sort of great discovery? It's not a discovery. It's just a definition. You can make your definitions as specific or as general as you'd like. If you make your definitions more specific, so that you can distinguish between symmetric operators, in general, and self-adjoint operators in particular, that can certainly be a useful distinction to make (especially in the complex vector spaces), but it doesn't constitute a discovery or a new insight in its own right.

I would definitely be willing to view a theorem or a lemma or a corollary as a discovery, but a definition or a collection of definitions is not a discovery. It's more like an arbitrary stipulation than a discovery. We can use definitions to help us understand things and generate new theorems and other results that genuinely do constitute discoveries, but in itself, the act of distinguishing between symmetric and self-adjoint operators is not really a discovery, it's just a convention for classifying certain linear operators.

If you actually want to talk about practical uses of functional analysis, I would say look to it's connections with lie groups and representation theory on the one hand, and then with pdes and dynamical systems on the other.