The Surprising Math: Proving that 1 Equals 0

First impossible fact. 1 equals 0. So this might come as a surprise, but, you know, we’re gonna see a proof. And I’m a mathematician, so, you know, I’m gonna be very convincing. I hope. So here’s the argument. Why does 1 equals 0? Well, we’re just gonna consider. Think about this innocuous little series of numbers. One minus 1 + 1 – 1 + 1 – 1 and so on. Now, it’s pretty obvious what this will all finish with, because it’s all comes in pairs, right? 1 – 1, another one minus another one. We’re just adding, but then taking away repeatedly. So this thing is just a bunch of one take away once. So we’re adding a load of zeros together, so we’ll end it with zero. Now, there’s another way of looking at it, the sort of bird in a hand argument, which is to say we start off with one, and then what do we do? We take away one, but we add it again. We take away one. What? We add it again. Minus 1 + 1 – 1 + 1. So really, what we have here is one plus a bunch of zeros. So one. Here we go. So we’ve. We’ve worked out the same thing two different ways, and we’ve got zero and we’ve got one, so those must be equal. QED 1 equals zero. So I’m sure you’re all happily believing now that 1 = 0. Just in case you’re not Entirely convinced. I will give you actually a couple more proofs of this as we go along.