I forget what it was called, but I remember a past post about trying to disprove very, very settled rules of math or science. A lot of the people who commented on it said that they had tried to do this as teenagers. (I never tried to construct unconstructable shapes, but I tried for a couple weeks to design a perpetual motion machine, once. I stopped after my middle school science teacher explained why a certain design wouldn’t work—the explanation was what I needed to finally grok the laws of thermodynamics.)
When I was very young—I think thirteen or maybe fourteen—I thought I had found a disproof of Cantor’s Diagonal Argument, a famous theorem which demonstrates that the real numbers outnumber the rational numbers. Ah, the dreams of fame and glory that danced in my head!
Hm, that’s true, I have heard that. Although in that particular case, it’s actually unknown whether the shape is constructible or not, and I was trying to prove (in)constructibility rather than construct.
I forget what it was called, but I remember a past post about trying to disprove very, very settled rules of math or science. A lot of the people who commented on it said that they had tried to do this as teenagers. (I never tried to construct unconstructable shapes, but I tried for a couple weeks to design a perpetual motion machine, once. I stopped after my middle school science teacher explained why a certain design wouldn’t work—the explanation was what I needed to finally grok the laws of thermodynamics.)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/j8/the_crackpot_offer/
Hm, that’s true, I have heard that. Although in that particular case, it’s actually unknown whether the shape is constructible or not, and I was trying to prove (in)constructibility rather than construct.