Confirmation of Shardholders Meeting

[Kurkistan]

This may just be another instance of me "discovering" a long known fact, but I saw this tweet on Brandon's feed:

Cameron Souri ‏@CameronSouri

@brandsanderson -will all shardholders from all the worlds/realms eventually meet in one 'place'?

‏@BrandSanderson

@CameronSouri They have been in the same place before. Many are dead now, though.

We already knew that the Letter-writer knew Ati personally and that both s/he and the recipient knew at least Rayse personally, but this gives some hard evidence to our assumptions so far that all the Shardholders were on the same world (Yolen, presumably) and even in the same place at the Shattering.

Edited February 12, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Pagerunner]

I don't have the quote, but I believe Brandon has been more specific than that in the past. IIRC, he said that all the Shardholders are characters in Dragonsteel.

[NewbSombrero]

Pagerunner is correct.

[Kurkistan]

So 1-for-3 so far this week. Not my best run.

EDIT: At least I didn't rediscover calculus, though :D/> (I've been waiting for an excuse to link to that particular article for awhile now).

Edited February 12, 2013 by Kurkistan

[dj26792]

that link is terrible, are they aware of a little known guy called... what was it, Sir Isaac Newton? I mean his work isn't all that well known and it is quite recent, but you'd think scientists would keep track of publications like that particularly ones they get taught about in high school.

[Kurkistan]

^The best part about it is that that paper has been cited multiple times.

[Pagerunner]

To be fair, it's not calculus, because the abstract says this method differs from the "graphic method" by 0.4%. This method uses triangles and rectangles, while integration uses just rectangles. The key to this method is probably what shape to use for each case, or something like that. And apart from that, calculus deals with equations, while this is a purely graphical solution based on a response curve (i.e. we don't know the equation).

(I'm not gonna say 1-for-4, but...)

[Kurkistan]

No! I refuse to be 1-in-4!

Calculus uses infinite infinitesimal rectangles, and so is functionally identical to any method that throws in triangles for fun. The 0.4% was probably just because of where his computer stopped trying for calc (i.e., "the graphic method").

Equations deliver the same results as graphical methods, only better, more generalizable, and more understandable, so I'm going to put this one in the "Newton did that, only he did it better" camp and call it a 1-for-3 day, thank you very much! ()

Edited February 13, 2013 by Kurkistan

[dj26792]

I'm with Kurk on that being Calculus, after all if Simpsons method and the trapezoidal equation are numerical estimations of calculus that use parabolas and trapezium's respectively, adding triangles does not make it significantly different from calculus.

[Dros]

By saying many are dead now, I guess that might mean more Shardholders are dead than we know about, right? (Three of sixteen confirmed dead right? That's merely a few, not many!) That's something new to me.

[Windrunner]

There are definitely more than three Shardholders dead.

Dead

• Devotion - Aona
  
• Dominion - Skai
  
• Preservation - Leras
  
• Ruin - Ati
  
• Honor - Tanavast
  

Alive

• Odium - Rayse
  

Status Unknown

• Endowment - Unknown
  
• Cultivation - Unknown
  
• Unknown - Bavadin
  

So, even if we assume that all the maybe Shardholders are still alive, the dead Shardholders outnumber the living ones. Personally, every time we hear of a new Shard or Shardholder, I've started assuming that they're dead. XD

[happyman]

That paper represents a small part of calculus known as numerical integration.

It does look like something that the physical sciences figured out before that paper came out, if my memory of my numerical methods class serves me well. However it isn't quite the same as reinventing calculus. Despite what it looks like, there are actually subtleties that take more advanced analysis to work through. Secondly, I'm quite certain said subtleties had been worked out before 1993, so they were almost certainly redoing known work. That's one of the risks of living in a world as flooded with information as ours.

[StormAtlas]

I hope that in one of Brandon's future books he will right a flash back of the meeting of all the holders. I've thought for awhile that they probably all came from the same planet at some point and time and in the beginning all knew eachother and interacted with each other on some level before going their separate ways.

[Kurkistan]

That paper represents a small part of calculus known as numerical integration.

It does look like something that the physical sciences figured out before that paper came out, if my memory of my numerical methods class serves me well. However it isn't quite the same as reinventing calculus. Despite what it looks like, there are actually subtleties that take more advanced analysis to work through. Secondly, I'm quite certain said subtleties had been worked out before 1993, so they were almost certainly redoing known work. That's one of the risks of living in a world as flooded with information as ours.

Aw, stop getting your reasonableness on our fun.

Edited February 22, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Chaos]

To add to the calculus factoids, well, there are certain generalizations of the integral that really do give you more information than the usual sort of integration (the one with rectangles--that is, Riemann integration). That kind, called Lebesque integration--defined much, much differently--allows you to integrate things that you couldn't normally. Things with an infinite, uncountable set of discontinuities and such. It replicates usual Riemann integration results on the usual things, but it allows you to integrate more... exotic functions, let's say.

So, you know, there are good generalizations of integration

But that's more or less irrelevant to the topic at hand XD

[Phantom Monstrosity]

So, you know, there are good generalizations of integration :P/>

And there are *bad* generalizations of integration as well.

Like, you can take the first or second integral, that makes sense. But taking the (i/2)th integral... that's messed up.

[Kurkistan]

But that's more or less irrelevant to the topic at hand XD

No worries. This thread was dead 60 minutes after I posted it. That's why I derailed it myself.

[happyman]

To add to the calculus factoids, well, there are certain generalizations of the integral that really do give you more information than the usual sort of integration (the one with rectangles--that is, Riemann integration). That kind, called Lebesque integration--defined much, much differently--allows you to integrate things that you couldn't normally. Things with an infinite, uncountable set of discontinuities and such. It replicates usual Riemann integration results on the usual things, but it allows you to integrate more... exotic functions, let's say.

So, you know, there are good generalizations of integration :P/>

But that's more or less irrelevant to the topic at hand XD

I'm actually a bit of a math nerd, so I know that there are other kinds of integration. It's not limited to Riemann or Lebesque, either! I've studied just enough measure theory to be able to mouth the right words. On the other hand, I also know that in most scientific applications, and definitely most numerical applications, Riemann is pretty much all you need, and conceptually simpler, to boot. I'm the kind of person, though, that likes to integrate over other measures, so I probably use Lebeque integration a lot. I just don't worry about it.