Hi Pandas! I was wondering if any of you in the BP community have some cool, interesting stories to share about your craziest belief as a child? Tell us, what is the craziest thing you believed in as a kid, aside from Santa Claus, of course (because the majority of us believed in Santa Claus—it's nothing to be considered crazy).
So please feel free to dig deep through your childhood memories and share some of the craziest beliefs you had as a child.
#81
when i was about 6 i always thought:
In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute, a non-profit dedicated to “increasing and disseminating mathematical knowledge,” asked the world to solve seven math problems and offered $1,000,000 to anybody who could crack even one. Today, they’re all still unsolved, except for the Poincaré conjecture.
In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute, a non-profit dedicated to “increasing and disseminating mathematical knowledge,” asked the world to solve seven math problems and offered $1,000,000 to anybody who could crack even one. Today, they’re all still unsolved, except for the Poincaré conjecture.
Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician who, around the turn of the 20th century, did foundational work in what we now call topology. Here’s the idea: Topologists want mathematical tools for distinguishing abstract shapes. For shapes in 3-D space, like a ball or a donut, it wasn’t very hard to classify them all. In some significant sense, a ball is the simplest of these shapes.
Poincaré then went up to 4-dimensional stuff, and asked an equivalent question. After some revisions and developments, the conjecture took the form of “Every simply-connected, closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to S^3,” which essentially says “the simplest 4-D shape is the 4-D equivalent of a sphere.”
Still with us?
A century later, in 2003, a Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman posted a proof of Poincaré’s conjecture on the modern open math forum arXiv. Perelman’s proof had some small gaps, and drew directly from research by American mathematician Richard Hamilton. It was groundbreaking, yet modest.
After the math world spent a few years verifying the details of Perelman’s work, the awards began. Perelman was offered the million-dollar Millennium Prize, as well as the Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize of Math. Perelman rejected both. He said his work was for the benefit of mathematics, not personal gain, and also that Hamilton, who laid the foundations for his proof, was at least as deserving of the prizes.
1point
#82
My mum never lied to me.... 😶 I feel bad for everyone else who got tricked by someone. 😓
0points
#83
I was so afraid of getting water up my nose because my dad told me one time that you could drown if there's water in your like lungs or something like that and it scared me so bad
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#84
When I was seven I thought Dunkaroos were made of kangaroo and people would bring them to school and I'd knock them out of their hands and tell them that they were made of kangaroo.
0points
#85
I think the craziest thing I ever believed when I was little was that the bare patch in the grass next to the playground held "the ancient" an bunch of gears from an alien spaceship that turned into a live map of the whole world. A lot of the kids at the elementary school also believed that there were a number of basilisks and leprechauns lurking on the other side of the fence....
0points
#86
I used to think i would die every time i got nosebleed, which happened quite often and in my child opinion i would run out of blood. Since it often happened during or after swimming lessons i hated to attend to those!
0points
#87
As a toddler I thought pine cones are small animals or insects and didn't want to walk over them. I started screaming and had to be carried over forrest tracks covered in pine.
0points