/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10949179
no

I did my PhD in statistical physics at the German Aerospace Center (the German ESA/NASA) in a satellite city behind the woods of a bigger city. My boss was also a prof but I didn't have to tutor or anything like that. It was overall a great time. I work 40h now but my free time only consists of personal research and project (and a little bit of sports). Just to counteract the general mentality here, with a light variation on the setting.

>>9001902
Theory or practice? As has been said above, you can go a long way without much quantum - just knowing exactly how a Vector Network Analyzer works implies you got enough knowledge to carry out the experiments. In QM, to get a feel for what you're doing, you gotta know what Rabi oscillations are, e.g. as presented in the book by Isaac Chuang and Michael Nielsen.

>>9001910
The field moves too slow. We can now factor 15 into 3 and 5 and my prediction is that in 5 years we'll still merely do academic work. Besides, three digits starting don't hurt me.

I think of it as calming activity as well as a ticket to fame

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Straus_conjecture

Conjecture:
For any n, there are x,y,z (all positive integers) such that

[math] 4/n = 1/x+1/y+1/z [/math]

For the Erdős–Straus conjecture, for given n, why is the number of solutions always finite?

My reasoning for why this is surprising is that as e.g. a possible z gets bigger, the term 1/z becomes less relevant and the range of values that y can take "should" grow.

Why is that not so? Why can we do brute force searches for any n?