How an SAT question became a mathematical paradox. Head to https://brilliant.org/veritasium to start your free 30-day trial, and the first 200 people get 20%...
  • themusicman@lemmy.world
    33·
    1 year ago

    For anyone still struggling with the intuition:

    How many times does a circle rotate if you roll it around a tiny dot? 1

    How many times does it rotate if you roll it around another circle the same size? Gotta be more than the dot, right?

  • lwuy9v5@lemmy.world
    16·
    1 year ago

    I would’ve never gotten that! I started getting lost trying to think about the differences in circumferences and radii before they mentioned the right or wrong answers

    • QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world
      10·
      1 year ago

      My only intuition was this: if you take two identical coins and rotate them together (like a pair of gears), it takes one rotation each to reach the starting point. If you now rotate your head along with one of the coins, it will appear standing still, while the other one will be rotating twice as fast.

      I still would have guessed the answer was 6, though. It took me awhile to figure out how extrapolate this model to a 3:1 ratio. As it turns out, it still works, and you get 4, but evidence of that was far from obvious to me.

    • YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.worldEnglish
      521·
      1 year ago

      I probably would have gotten four because I would have visually saw the answer without knowing the equation.

  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyz
    14·
    1 year ago

    One thing that helped me intuit the “sidereal” result (4) was to consider what happens as the radius of circle B approaches 0. At least in my mind, it seems pretty clear that A has to undergo at least one rotation.

    That said, I am unsure that I would have caught this as a test-taker. Derek’s videos always have some “trick”, putting me on guard, but in a testing scenario I would have seen the answer for 3 with no answer for 4, marked it down, and moved on quickly.

  • kalkulat@lemmy.world
    121·
    1 year ago

    VG video. Confused by the word ‘revolve’? How many times does the Earth ‘revolve’ around the Sun in a year?

    But, worse yet, there were THREE correct answers … none listed!

  • protist@mander.xyzEnglish
    122·
    1 year ago

    I did not watch this video but did read about this math. Visualize the larger circle unwrapped into a flat line, and the smaller circle sliding along the length of the line so its bottom point is fixed to the line. You’ll see the small circle never rotates. Now slide the small circle with a point fixed onto the large circle in the same way, and you’ll see the small circle makes one complete rotation. That rotation happens in addition to the rotations you get from dividing the larger circumference by the smaller circumference, so the answer is 4 in this case

  • UraniumBlazer@lemm.eeEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    I’m proud to say that I got 4 as the answer in the beginning. HOWEVER, the options threw me off, which made me watch the rest of the video :(

    • Jakylla@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      I was like “Hum… That should do like more than 3.5, but 4 at maximum…”

      Then he shows options, and I was like “What ? There’s nothing between 3.5 and 4”; then thought about it a bit more, and found Exactly 4 as an answer; then continued to watch the end of the video to see why my calculations were wrong (they wer’nt)

  • Tournesol bot@jlai.luBEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    This video is recommended by Tournesol:
    [38🌻] Veritasium: The SAT Question Everyone Got Wrong

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  • FrankTheHealer@lemmy.world
    33·
    1 year ago

    So I’m confused. I saw this and initially thought it was just a matter of circumference. Suppose the radius of circle A is 10 and the radius of circle B is twice that amount, so it’s 20

    The formula to find the circumference of a circle is C = 2πr

    So for circle A;

    2π10 = 62.831

    And for circle B;

    2π20 = 125.663

    Then to find the difference in circumferences, divide them

    125.663/62.831 = 2.000

    Therefore, it should take two rotations to rotate one circle around the other

    What am I getting wrong here?

    • CommationCerebrole@jlai.lu
      10·
      1 year ago

      There’s one extra-rotation from an external perspective due to the revolution of one around the other. So the formula is r1 / r2 + 1.

      This extra-rotation doesn’t appear from the point of view of the circles, or if you consider the circles as two stationary gears

    • simple@lemm.eeOP
      5·
      1 year ago

      He spends the first 5 minutes explaining the answer is 4, but the question was also worded ambiguously that 3 and 1 can also be correct answers.

      Maybe watch the video, it’s more interesting than you’d think

    • oo1@kbin.social
      31·
      1 year ago

      How did this video stretch out to 18 mins?
      I remember a mindyourdecisions yt video about this from several years ago that showed it in a couple of minutes and why it is n+1.
      sorry i don’t remember the url though.

      • minorninth@lemmy.world
        5·
        1 year ago

        It explains the answer is 4 before the 5 minute mark.

        Part of the reason is because it goes into the story of the SAT being wrong and a student being the one to catch it, which I found interesting.

        After that it mathematically proves it several different ways and then shows how it relates to some real problems in astronomy.