April 1st doing its thing !

[Valentin Albillo]

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Hi, Bob,

(04-03-2023 12:58 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  Thanks for sharing these Valentin, quite entertaining, though I've only skimmed them so far! I'm amazed at the level of effort people expended in order to create these "papers", whose format, style and tone all feel quite genuinely "Academic Paper" level.

Exactly my thoughts, it surely took their authors a lot of time and effort to concoct them, most definitely the 51-page (!!) "cosmic Galois ..." one.

Quote:Have you read them closely enough to assess if the math and analysis contained in them is valid? I'd assume so, but that means even more time and effort was required, compounding the overall effort.

I've read them with various degrees of closeness, as there are some with very little math and others like the aforementioned "cosmic Galois" one which feature 51 pages of densely-packed, complex-looking, effectively inscrutable math. The paper BruceH mentions is more amenable and for example, the definite integral in expressions (1) and (2) on page 4 are perfectly correct, so probably all the not-too-convoluted math is likely to be sound as well, indicating the extra effort put by the authors to give their creations an aspect of believability.

Quote:Your own efforts creating, documenting and sharing your challenges and papers is clearly of a similar scope, but I find they 'entertain' me in a more satisfying way than the humor in these papers. I suppose this is part of what makes me an HP Calculator Geek, and the good news is they come more often than once a year.

Why, thank you, you're too kind and I'm delighted to count with your appreciation. In the past I used to publish "April 1st" challenges which strived to feel impossible, too difficult or just plain jokes but were actually quite solvable, like the ones in

Sweet & Short Math Challenges #15: April 1st Spring Special

      and

Short & Sweet Math Challenge #18: April 1st, 2007 Spring Special

The latter was published on 4-01-2007 and includes the puzzling HP-71B-specific challenge "Find a root x of Abs(Ln(x*x)-Ln(x^2)) > 4.012007", which mystified a lot of people, über-71B-expert J-F Garnier included ...

Best regards.
V.
Edit: speaking of following the math, this Arxiv PDF paper (published today, April 4th) is a riot !

On the Closed-Form Solution to the Interior Goat Problem in One Dimension

It even mentions the case of zero dimensions.