I think it needs to be said because the people promulgating the falsehood are legitimate mathematicians. And most of the time their blog has quality stuff. But they dropped the ball on this one.
Forgive me, but I really don't understand your point. Do you think they believe it?
This is proper geek fun with serious points underneath and a good smattering of why it's actually valid to consider these things. This isn't established people with proper reputations setting out to con the unsuspecting public. There is solid math going on here. See Terry Tao's recent blog post[0] about why we can and should play with these things.
And now it's late here and I'm going off-line for a while. As I said elsewhere, I need to detach for a bit.
Added in edit: Just checking before signing off for the night and I see that the submission of Terry Tao's blog entry on this topic has been killed. By mods, flags, whatever, I don't know. here's the link[1] if you're interested, and this is me, signing off.
Depends on what you mean by "they" and "it". The numberphile folks undoubtedly know that they are playing fast and loose with the rules. The readers of Slate almost certainly don't know it.
> There is solid math going on here.
No, there isn't. There is solid math going on in complex analysis where you have concepts like analytic extensions that produce unintuitive but useful and (more importantly) consistent results. But that is NOT what this video is about. This video is about using high school math to "prove" a result that is simply not true under the rules of high school math. The only thing separating this from outright crackpottery is that the result they derive happens to look like one that can be legitimately derived under the rules of complex analysis and analytic extensions. But that's a mighty thin reed. It doesn't change the fact that they present the result as if it were true under the rules of high school math, and under those rules it isn't true.
EDIT: Terry Tao's article is excellent, and I am appalled (but, sadly, not surprised) that your submission was killed.
Hm, my own submission seems to have fallen off the front page awfully quickly.
EDIT2: I have been corresponding with an HN mod who informed me that my submission triggered the voting ring detector. (It was a false positive, which ought to worry someone at YC.) Also, the original Terry Tao submission has now been unkilled. I encourage you to upvote it.
