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A large part of my fascination in mathematics is because of some very surprising results that I have seen there.

I remember one I found very hard to swallow when I first encountered it, was what is known as the Banach Tarski Paradox. It states that you can separate a ball $x^2+y^2+z^2 \le 1$ into finitely many disjoint parts, rotate and translate them and rejoin (by taking disjoint union), and you end up with exactly two complete balls of the same radius!

So I ask you which are your most surprising moments in maths?

  • Chances are you will have more than one. May I request post multiple answers in that case, so the voting system will bring the ones most people think as surprising up. Thanks!
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big-list usually means community wiki. For this question it applies. – Aryabhata Aug 21 '10 at 19:01
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And maybe also mathoverflow.net/questions/18100/… . – Qiaochu Yuan Aug 21 '10 at 21:21
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I'm getting tired of this question being bumped every once in a while. It seems to have served its purpose and there's no need to accumulate more than 100 answers. Therefore I voted to close it. – t.b. Sep 5 '11 at 22:09
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closed as too localized by t.b., Zev Chonoles Sep 5 '11 at 22:18

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.

91 Answers

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Dirichlet’s Theorem: Every proper arithmetic sequence contains a prime.

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In fact, an infinite number of them. – I. J. Kennedy May 20 '11 at 19:05
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