Numbers are not dull

[topum]

I just came across the Interesting Number Paradox.

"The interesting number paradox is a semi-humorous paradox which arises from the attempt to classify natural numbers as "interesting" or "dull". The paradox states that all natural numbers are interesting. The "proof" is by contradiction: if there exists a non-empty set of uninteresting numbers, there would be a smallest uninteresting number – but the smallest uninteresting number is itself interesting because it is the smallest uninteresting number, producing a contradiction."

Interesting.

Comments

[found-world.livejournal.com]

It is.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

This is somewhat related to some other weird bits of set theory, like, making a set of all sets that contain themselves, and then making another set of all sets that don't contain themselves, and trying to decide whether that second set does or doesn't contain itself.
It's games just like this that led Kurt Godel to come up with his incompleteness theorem and prove that in any nontrivial math system, you can ask questions that the math system cannot answer.

[itsjustc.livejournal.com]

I remember the comedian Dave Gorman pointing this out to us during one of his shows :)