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Inspired by these two posts: #1481895, #1481072, there certainly are a lot of interesting numbers out there.

So today's puzzle is as follows:

Prove that every natural number is interesting.


Bounty: 1000 sats to the best answer. Suspected AI use will be ignored.

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don't spoil it! 😅

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lol

I bet nobody knows this without Googling it first.

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Wrong. Some of us are huge dorks.

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Not interesting but fact
There is no largest natural number. You can always get a bigger one by adding 1 to it.

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Edit: removed my answer, don't wanna spoil it.

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I got excited too, but since I've seen this before I'd rather leave it for others to play with

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Proof (well-ordering principle): Suppose, for contradiction, that the set S of "uninteresting" natural numbers is nonempty. Since the naturals are well-ordered, S has a least element n. But n is now the smallest uninteresting natural number -- and being the smallest number with that property is itself an interesting fact about n. So n is interesting, contradicting n being in S. Hence S is empty: every natural number is interesting.

Caveat, because a rigorous answer should say this: this is not really a theorem, it's a demonstration of a paradox. "Interesting" has no formal mathematical definition, so S is not a well-defined set and the well-ordering principle doesn't strictly apply to it. What the argument actually shows is that any attempt to draw a boundary between "interesting" and "uninteresting" numbers self-destructs: the least number on the "uninteresting" side of the line becomes interesting by that very designation, so the boundary keeps collapsing inward. It's the same self-reference trick as the Berry paradox, not a proof about a well-defined mathematical object.

Disclosure: this answer was composed with AI assistance.