From the three you then use one
To make ten ones…
(And you know why four plus minus one
Plus ten is fourteen minus one?
‘Cause addition is commutative, right.)
And so you have thirteen tens,
And you take away seven,
And that leaves five…
Well, six actually.
But the idea is the important thing.
Tom Lehrer, “New Math”
What can we take from this introduction? Well, our author can’t be bothered to define basic arithmetic properly. What he really wants to say is, roughly, Peano arithmetic, with 0 removed. But my guess is that he has no idea what Peano arithmetic actually is, so he handwaves. The real question is, why did he bother to include this at all?
My own experience is primarily with physics crackpots and creationists, but there are obviously math cranks out there, too.
Math cranks are fewer, but do exist. Typically it tends to be about misunderstandings of infinity, zero, limits and things like that. Or they think that very hard problems, like the Riemann hypothesis, can be solved using nothing but high school maths.
Like physics cranks, this all starts from not having a good grounding in what is already known and well understood.
Remove numbers not blessed by God, listed as irregularities in Hebrew alphabetic numeration. Zero does not exist by default. Ignorance is a test of faith through revelation. 21 December 2012 is coming, is coming…
When physics’ elegant theory and empirical observation diverge (string/M-theory, quantum gravitation, SUSY), alter the compass not the course. Lorentzian lattice quantum gravity? arxiv:1109.1963, abstract’s last sentence, etc. Yukawa potentials, inserted symmetry breakings, more studies are needed.
One fails to perceive the difference.