alt Hacker News> Odrzywolek's result is immediately obvious
This may or may not be true; but the burden of proof should not lay with the reader.
Please provide (in absence of which every reader can draw their own conclusions) a reference which simultaneously:
1) predates Odrzywolek's result
2) and demonstrates the other unary and binary operations typically tacitly assumed can be expressed in terms of a single binary operation and a constant.
(in other news: I can spontaneously levitate, I just don't feel like demonstrating it to you right now...)
Replies
zephen • last Wednesday at 1:15 PM
Upvoted back to not-greyed-out. You must have struck a nerve.
Questions which have never been asked or answered before, but to which practitioners have immediately obvious answers, are dime a dozen in mathematics.
You can find thousands of such questions on Math StackExchange. Take e.g. [1]: never been asked anywhere else, interesting enough, yet answered pretty much immediately by two separate mathematicians.
"Is there a single constant and function with connected domain that can express all of $\log, \exp, \sin, \dots$?" would have made a fine question there too, the type that gets a thorough answer very quickly if anyone bothers to ask it.
> the burden of proof should not lay with the reader
You were the one who made the claim that "this is one of the most significant discoveries in years". Feel free to substantiate that claim first, according to the same standards. Are there any authors who ask this question, and/or suggest that they don't know an answer?
[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2308587/is-the-set-...