The article they had on there for the holocaust was, inexplicably, the most clever mathematics humor I've ever seen. I just checked and it looks like they've done a good bit of work in ruining that article, but I looked through the edit history and found a good version of it: link
For those who don't have a math background, the author is inventing a mathematical concept called a "political field", which he's just using to refer to any specific topic in politics. In the real world a field is an algebraic gadget, but he's added a couple gags to allude to politics, such as renaming the additive and multiplicative identities to "undecided elements", which is pretty amusing when he's calling left and right inverses "left-wing" and "right-wing" instead. He's then giving his invention a topology so he can talk about "open" and "closed" issues. The main joke is that the holocaust is a political topic which invites comparisons from all other extreme tragedies (hence the analogy with the math concept of a colimit), which leads the loudest voices in politics to be eager to compare their pet issues (here other political fields) to the holocaust. The spiel about "the politicomathematicians Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson" spending years trying to construct a comparison from the holocaust to abelian torsion groups ("Ab-Torsion" suggesting abortion here) by talking about incompatibility with the axiom of choice is amazing, whether theorems are compatible with the axiom of choice is a real thing in mathematics but here he's playing on the real-life idea of being pro-choice.
10/10 article in the original edit, I'm disappointed with the awful stuff that's been added in since then to ruin it but actually somewhat surprised that the core of it is still somewhat intact. I'm really curious about the genesis of this article because I have no clue how the author could come up with this, it's brilliant.
Lol that article might be brilliant, but it's not funny at all to someone without a post doctorate in pure mathematics. I for one was completely lost when reading it, and your comment gave me some understanding of it
Oh my, thank you so much for pointing me towards that article! I'm going to enjoy reading it. It is indeed humor only for people who've studied math at the graduate level though, huh? I'm not surprised it's been changed, I suspect the original is just a little too technical for the average uncyclopedia reader. Too bad, really!
I am shocked that the uncyclopedia still exists.
The article they had on there for the holocaust was, inexplicably, the most clever mathematics humor I've ever seen. I just checked and it looks like they've done a good bit of work in ruining that article, but I looked through the edit history and found a good version of it: link
For those who don't have a math background, the author is inventing a mathematical concept called a "political field", which he's just using to refer to any specific topic in politics. In the real world a field is an algebraic gadget, but he's added a couple gags to allude to politics, such as renaming the additive and multiplicative identities to "undecided elements", which is pretty amusing when he's calling left and right inverses "left-wing" and "right-wing" instead. He's then giving his invention a topology so he can talk about "open" and "closed" issues. The main joke is that the holocaust is a political topic which invites comparisons from all other extreme tragedies (hence the analogy with the math concept of a colimit), which leads the loudest voices in politics to be eager to compare their pet issues (here other political fields) to the holocaust. The spiel about "the politicomathematicians Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson" spending years trying to construct a comparison from the holocaust to abelian torsion groups ("Ab-Torsion" suggesting abortion here) by talking about incompatibility with the axiom of choice is amazing, whether theorems are compatible with the axiom of choice is a real thing in mathematics but here he's playing on the real-life idea of being pro-choice.
10/10 article in the original edit, I'm disappointed with the awful stuff that's been added in since then to ruin it but actually somewhat surprised that the core of it is still somewhat intact. I'm really curious about the genesis of this article because I have no clue how the author could come up with this, it's brilliant.
Lol that article might be brilliant, but it's not funny at all to someone without a post doctorate in pure mathematics. I for one was completely lost when reading it, and your comment gave me some understanding of it
Oh my, thank you so much for pointing me towards that article! I'm going to enjoy reading it. It is indeed humor only for people who've studied math at the graduate level though, huh? I'm not surprised it's been changed, I suspect the original is just a little too technical for the average uncyclopedia reader. Too bad, really!