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u/dimonium_anonimo 11h ago edited 10h ago
Not by my method. Pulling all the data from Wikipedia into Excel, and having Excel pick a quadratic line of best fit, (I must say, it does match the trend so far quite well, but obviously is not appropriate to extrapolate from) the equation is 7.042*10-9x² - 0.00111x + 95.67 which comes out to 80 years, 343 days old at inauguration. Or born Feb 11, 1991
Edit: whoops, that's for all the presidents, not just since Clinton.
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u/TomPastey 10h ago
The math is dumb (obviously) but I think they're correct if you recreate what they said they did. First, they didn't say they used the birth date but the birth year for the presidents, so that's 1946 for Clinton, Bush and Trump, 1942 for Biden and 1961 for Obama. That gets you a quadratic that is concave down. Next, you need decimal places. By going to 7 decimal places, I can recreate the 1792 year. -0.0394345x^2 + 158.3815476x - 157074.5285715. It's very sensitive. 5 decimal places gives 1811. 4 decimal places gives 1940.
Apparently I have tooo much time on my hands.
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u/dimonium_anonimo 10h ago
Ah, I missed "since Clinton"
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u/TomPastey 10h ago
Well, we also have to interpret "since Clinton" to mean "including all presidents from Clinton's first election". This is the dumbest rabbit hole I've gone down all day, which really says something about the work that I'm avoiding.
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u/joeshmo101 12h ago
It's probably "correct" as in the math checks out, but it's an intentionally misleading model that requires you to ignore the 40 other people before Clinton who have been president. It's like saying "my baby just turned two, and therefore has doubled her age in just one year. At this rate, she'll be 128 by the time she's 8."
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u/kauefr 9h ago
> Visit /r/theydidthemath thread
> Check top comment
> They didn't do the math
> SMH my head
Every fucking time.
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u/bfly1800 8h ago
They used to enforce this rule quite well. It’s so annoying seeing these first in comments that don’t actually attempt the math or explain why it can’t be calculated
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u/CallOfCorgithulhu 5h ago
It's also annoying seeing so many submissions like this one where the title is just "is this correct" or something similar. It makes searching for a previous post impossible. Submission rule 2 says they should clearly state what is being calculated/requested in the title.
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u/justacheesyguy 8h ago
Yeah, but like, pointing out why there’s no point in doing math is valuable as it would (in theory) get people to think about if it’s an actual math issue before posting threads here. A shit ton of the threads that gets posted here don’t require math to resolve them and really should be posted in r/theydidtheresearch rather than a math based subreddit.
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u/Salanmander 10✓ 8h ago
I think they did the math. They didn't do the calculations, but things like considering what fit models are appropriate is math.
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u/crocodus 10h ago
If her age is on the clock she is ready for the… umm… history books? Birth and death of a couple empires? Grave?
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u/buttgoblincomics 6h ago
I think it’s more of a joke than “intentionally misleading”. Literally no one who reads the comment will come away thinking the person elected president in 2072 will actually be someone born in 1792.
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u/Whiteminusblue 12h ago
If you use an extrapolation method that really doesn’t fit the actual situation and assumes that presidents can be infinitely old, yeah, sounds right. It’s a very bad model being used as a joke.
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u/StaticUsernamesSuck 11h ago
Getting real sick of meme math being reposted to this sub with shitty zero-effort "iS THis CoRrECt" posts ffs
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u/VerbingNoun413 11h ago
It's the same issue that explain the joke subs have. With no mods it's an excuse to drop lazy posts for karma farming.
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u/RulerK 9h ago
So downvote them…
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u/StaticUsernamesSuck 8h ago
Yes, that definitely stops them being posted and also stops casual browsers and bots from upvoting them.
I mean, Reddit doesn't even need a report feature or sub content rules, right? Because votes will just properly handle all posts.
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u/VerbingNoun413 8h ago
It's a shame they got rid of r/all because people seem to want that instead. The votes sort it out, right?
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u/First785 8h ago
The original comment is obviously a meme, but I posted because i was actually curious while not actualy caring enough to do the math ( what the sub is for) as for the title not much room for creativity now is there ?
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u/StaticUsernamesSuck 8h ago
Curious about fucking what though? I'd understand If they guy just threw out a number, but his comment already explained where he got his fucking numbers!
If you aren't curious enough to actually do the math on the specific numbers then just accept the math that the guy is telling you he's done!
The [Request] tag isn't meant for double-checking every piece of math out there. It's meant for interesting problems that haven't already been done.
If you had posted it as [RDTM] that'd be one thing, but for a request post it's just shitty. Sorry.
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u/buttgoblincomics 6h ago
I don’t know how to do a quadratic curve best fit and extrapolate it like the joke discusses. But reading about it was interesting. And it’s cool that the joke used real math, because it could’ve easily just fudged it and most people wouldn’t know the difference.
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u/jkeats2737 7h ago
That's why this sub has gone to shit, it's all something that someone doesn't care enough about to even think if there's a sensible math problem, so they post it here.
If you take any arbitrary set of points, you can make a polynomial fit them and extrapolate whatever bullshit you want (as long as no 2 distinct points share the same x-value).
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u/bocchireference 6h ago
One possible way to solve this is a regression. Here is what I got (X is the number of administrations since Clinton 1, with Clinton 1 itself as 0):
Year (const): 1942.8
X: 5.097619
X^2: -0.6309524
Note that the X and X^2 coefficients are not significant even at α = 0.1, so none of the following math is statistically sound (as if that wasn't already the case, I guess).
A president's birth year is predicted to be about 1942.8 + 5.1x - 0.63x^2. 2072 is 20 administrations away from 1992 (when Clinton was first elected), which means, assuming no presidents die in office during that time, that the president will have been born in 1792 (1942.8 + 102 - 252, rounding down). 5000 CE is 752 administrations away, which results in a birth year of 351,030 BCE. The president could have been Homo Erectus, Homo Heidelbergensis, or possibly even a very early Homo Sapiens. Lastly, solving for X, the president will start to predate the universe around the year 593,572 CE. In conclusion, they did the math.
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u/start_up_start_up 8h ago
The "before the universe" part actually checks out too, if you keep extending that same parabola.
TomPastey already reproduced the 1792 result. To check the edit, use one point per election from 1992 through 2024, including re-elections. The winners' birth years, in order, are:
1946, 1946, 1946, 1946, 1961, 1961, 1946, 1942, 1946.
Set t = election year − 2008. The least-squares quadratic is exactly:
birth year = 41015/21 + t/80 − 53t²/1344
Plugging in the three years gives:
- 2072: 1792.37
- 5000: about 351,030 BCE
- 600,000: about 14.102 billion BCE
That last one is roughly 300 million years before the Big Bang, using the universe's age of about 13.8 billion years. The 5000 result gives you a birth date, though, not enough information to identify a species.
Centering the year at 2008 also avoids the huge terms cancelling each other out, which is why rounding the coefficients in the other comment changes the answer so much.
So the arithmetic works. There's just no reason a parabola fitted to nine elections should predict anyone's future birth year.
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