He was abducted by Hagrid when he turned 11 so that would place him maybe around the fifth or sixth grade.

I don’t know if canonically there are math classes at Hogwarts.


The thought came to while I was watching the anime Mashle. If you are into Harry Potter and One-Punch Man I’d recommend giving it a watch.


Someone mentioned this community below; I wanted to highlight it.

Small promotion for [email protected]

  • piecar@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    I think you’re right. They probably don’t know math. I mean, what would they need it for? They probably don’t have to follow the laws of physics for the most part. If math is done it’s probably 100% recreational.

  • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    I’m sure Hogwarts also covered general education stuff but that would be boring to us so they focused on the magic stuff. That’s my theory though.

    • Corroded@leminal.spaceOP
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      10 months ago

      Boring? This is the same universe where wizards canonically defecated in the streets and used fecal vanishing spells.

      However, when Hogwarts’ plumbing became more elaborate in the eighteenth century (this was a rare instance of wizards copying Muggles, because hitherto they simply relieved themselves wherever they stood, and vanished the evidence), the entrance to the Chamber was threatened, being located on the site of a proposed bathroom.

      https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/chamber-of-secrets

      • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
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        10 months ago

        Im surprised that’s so controversial. I would expect wizards to do exactly that if it wasn’t for modern plumbing, I mean, people used to shit in pots and dump it out their window into the street in the morning. Or crap in a cold and smelly hole inside a basic wooden shed out in their yard. If you have magic at that point why would you not instead delete it afterwards, considering the alternatives?

        • Corroded@leminal.spaceOP
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          10 months ago

          Does vanishing feces mean is deleted though or is it going to end up in the walls of buildings like Arby’s wrappers left behind by construction workers?

          • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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            10 months ago

            I think there’s a throwaway line in a book that a wizard discovered vanishing things sent them to another dimension.

            • Iapar@feddit.de
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              10 months ago

              Imagine it landed in our dimension and people are trying to make sense of it.

              “Honey, I think the dog shat on the chandelier…”

          • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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            10 months ago

            Yeah, none of them seem to be aware of guns. You now how often dark wizards do spells in the books to protect themselves against projectiles? Never. They never do a spell like that, so far as I know.

            • Azzu@lemm.ee
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              10 months ago

              As far as I know, the Protego spell protects against physical forces. The reason no one uses projectiles (they certainly could catapult stuff around with spells as well) is probably because it’s common knowledge that it does nothing.

  • SendMePhotos@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Okay dude… Because of YOU I started watching Mashle and I’m not even big into anime. I’ve watched a few and like some occasionally…

    Mashle is awesome. Damn/thank you.

  • Isakk86@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    YEAH! Where’s the book where he just does algebra and other boring shit for 300 pages.

        • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz
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          10 months ago

          Science: wow that is a nice animal you have there; have you seen out Large Hadron Collider, it accelerates clouds of particles up to close to the limit of causality and slams them into specially designed targets. We do this to probe the secrets of the universe at the edges of imagination and plausibility.

          Magic: I can kill people by pointing my stick at them…

          Science: yeah, we have that also…how big do yours get? We have a problem where we went too far and now can destroy the world, but because everyone has these weapons we live in an uneasy tension called mutually assured destruction, so no one uses their most powerful weapons for fear that others will also.

          Magic: I can make it rain when I want.

          Science: ok now that would be useful, you have to teach me how to do that.

  • WastedJobe@feddit.de
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    10 months ago

    Isn’t arithmetic a class in Hogwarts and just a fancy word for maths (not a native speaker)? I think only Hermione takes it though and it’s only mentioned in the books.

    • Vilian@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      could hogwarts defeng itself against modern weapons? like missils and shit?

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Yeah. Easily.

        Reducto or any of a dozen other spells that make shit explode, magical barriers, simply transfiguring the weapons to something else… telekinesis. Simply not being there.

        And before you add “what if they were surprised…” …. It’s possible, but remember how shocked Hagrid was about the lie the Dursley’s told Potter? “A car crash?! A Car CRASH?! Kill lily and James potter?!….”

        • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

          I don’t know. I’ve always thought a sniper could have taken out Voldemort. Far away, camouflaged, and the bullet gets there faster than the sound. It’s a reaction time thing.

          • Azzu@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            Obviously, JK Rowling was not a tactical mastermind.

            However in the universe she created, any powerful wizard worth a damn would simply keep protective shields up all the time, especially against such simple things like “fast objects hitting them”.

            Protego seems to be doing a lot with barely any effort to cast. Fred&George even create permanently enchanted clothing with Protego on it.

          • unalivejoy@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            Reaction time isn’t really relevant when you are good at divination and ultra sensory perception.

            • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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              10 months ago

              He came from muggle land, so he is probably aware of guns. He could probably easily made his skin bullet proof with some spell. It’s not like wizards can’t invent new spells and magic. They just almost always seem to choose not to. I think the vast majority of wizards are lazy hacks.

              • fkn@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                I also think it’s just supposed to be hard to make new magic and the spells that are common were built to be common.

                For example, it is possible for anyone to write a new program for their phone. How many people actually can or do? How many people, with some training, can use most of not all of the programs that others have built to be productive.

                • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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                  10 months ago

                  How hard can it be? The Weasleys are all adept at it. The mother showcases spells and items never seen before or again in the story. The father turns muggle objects into working magical objects, the most famous being the car that can fly. The twins create three stories worth of magical objects for their store.

                  Maybe your right and the Weasleys, Snape and Voldemort are some of the most intelligent wizards.

          • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            I would expect Voldemort to have protective spells keeping things like that from happening.

            If it were that easy to kill a witch or wizzard… then there’s lots of ways to go about that. He wouldn’t have needed a special wand to fight Harry. he’d just fling a ginormous rock out of nowhere.

            • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
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              10 months ago

              Well, we know that wizards are vulnerable to physical attack and to surprise attacks. There’s the whomping willow, which they can’t just cast a force field against. There were the spiders and the centaurs in the forest. The big three headed dog. That devil’s something plant. And if I recall, Voldemort didn’t realize the caretaker had come into the house until he was in the hallway and Nagini saw him. Sorry, it’s been a hot minute since I read those.

              Wizards, one would think, could go flinging cars around whenever they wanted to, but they use death spells, even on muggles. Maybe they think it’s gauche to do something so mundane as dropping a rock on someone’s head, I couldn’t say. Jedi use the Force to throw things, but not to just crush someone’s head or rip it from their body. That would take a lot less force (so to speak) than lifting an X-wing, but they still use lightsabers.

              And for what it’s worth, I think a sniper could take out a Jedi, too.

              • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                Well, we know that wizards are vulnerable to physical attack and to surprise attacks…

                the killing curse is probably simply more efficient for the task at hand. It’s also by and large, more discrete. In any case, all the things you listed were evaded by a couple of poorly taught kids. Like literally… children. Fluffy, the devil’s vine thing, (along with all the other challenges from teachers)… one of those kids had exactly a year’s worth of experience with magic. I could also kill an M1A1 Abrams with a rock if I stuffed it in the right place. (I’m thinking exhaust.). Doesn’t mean i want to fight an Abrams with a rock. or… at all.

                again for surprise …[Hagrid’s insistence a mere car crash woudln’t kill the Potters[(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoeSuboKeBk). They could probably literally just poof into smoke before a bullet ever fully breaks the skin.

                Wizards, one would think, could go flinging cars around whenever they wanted to, but they use death spells, even on muggles. Maybe they think it’s gauche to do something so mundane as dropping a rock on someone’s head, I couldn’t say. Jedi use the Force to throw things, but not to just crush someone’s head or rip it from their body. That would take a lot less force (so to speak) than lifting an X-wing, but they still use lightsabers.

                Jedi use the lightsaber specifically because they’re taught the Force isn’t for killing. They just love running around in bathrobes waving their glowbats around. (stop giggling. no seriously. stop giggling. Okay fine. giggle. a little. mace’s has a vibrating lenses.)

                The Sith have used the force to mow down entire armies, though. for example Maul running amok on a venator. still, the Sith use lightsabers as a symbol- invoking fear and terror, which further powers their dark-side natures. They also use lightsabers when it’s more efficient. (hurling rocks is… taxing, yes?)

                • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
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                  10 months ago

                  I think we can agree to disagree on the sneak attack/sniper from a half a kilometer away.

                  I did not know that about the Jedi, though. I really was going to write “Sith” but said fuck it because I figured someone with the wherewithal to cut a bad guy in half wouldn’t have a moral system that would prevent them from crushing a head. Plus, it was a callback to a long forgotten skit (I think it was on SNL, but it could have been any of those sketch shows) where the character would look at a person standing far away through his thumb and forefinger and make it look to him like he was crushing their heads.

                  The Jedi do use their force power to kill droids, though, and droids in the franchise certainly possess self-awareness, and are conscious beings who demonstrate every human behavior, so I have to wonder how that’s handled. I think I remember someone getting offended because he was called “just a droid.”

                  I kind of lost interest in the franchise after the first prequel, and so I’m obviously forgetting a lot. Plus, I skipped most of the recent movies (although I’m told the new series is really good, and I did enjoy the first season of Mando.

                  Anyway, thanks for teaching me something!

                  Plus, killing an Abrams with a rock is pretty funny. It reminds me of the Beverly Hill Cop scene where Eddie Murphy puts a banana in the guy’s tailpipe.

    • Lad@reddthat.com
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      10 months ago

      The series would have ended much sooner if Harry had brought an AK47 to hogwarts

            • EndlessApollo@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              Idk I can’t remember anyone in Harry Potter using it as a straight up slur, the worst I can think of is some people use it in a rude way like “The Blacks” or “The Gays”. I haven’t read them in a long time tho, I just remember mudblood being a slur and muggle being the accepted term, even by muggleborn magic users

              • Herbal Gamer@sh.itjust.works
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                10 months ago

                That’s because Mudblood is a magic user born from a Muggle family. A different term from Muggle itself. Pretty sure Muggle is an accepted term in the overall society (it’s used in the Ministry’s Department name for example), except from a few ‘activists’ you might hear of.

                I believe there’s someone like that in Hogwarts Legacy as well.

              • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
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                10 months ago

                What’s wrong about saying the blacks or the gays? That’s just refering to a specific group of people. Only thing I can see as problematic is the generalization that follows but that’s always the case when talking about groups.

                • Bgugi@lemmy.world
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                  10 months ago

                  People take offense to using adjectives describing a group of people as a noun. For example “the black community” or “people who are gay” describe a subset (describe a portion of the overall community,) whereas “the blacks” or “the gays” describe a distinct set (and imply that group as an “other”)

            • brygphilomena@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              Muggle isnt a slur, just as wizard isnt a slur. It’s not a derogatory term. It’s just their word for non-magic people while non-magic people use the word wizard or witch.

          • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            The preferred term is NaMP - Not a Magical Person/Non-Magical Person. You could also say “Person of Non-Magic,” but it’s hard to pronounce “ponm.”

      • reddig33@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Muggles is wizard slang for non-magical human beings. Like Darren on Bewitched would be a muggle. He cooks his food using an oven instead of magic. The oven is muggle tech.

    • T156@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Although that could also be them being perplexed by the fact that muggles did it with no magic at all.

      Imagine us discovering a species that developed computers and tech just like ours, but using neither transistors nor electricity.

    • chaogomu@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      There was Arithmancy, the Harry Potter wiki says that it was using numbers to predict the future. It was an elective and Harry didn’t take it.

      The only other class that would have had math would be Astronomy, which was a required class for all students. The students are required to make star charts and such… Seems like rote memorization was the only thing taught. The wink says that the end of year 5 tests was filling in a blank star chart from memory.

      They might get some English pointers in the dozens of essays they wrote, but since essays are graded on the length of the scroll… it becomes questionable.

      • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        I think everyone hated alchemy not because of Snape alone, but because it involves math too. Scaling the resulting doze of a potion, balancing it’s effects, predicting chemi-magical reactions of ingredients - it’s all math. And Severus was portrayed just like an average techie teaching a class of humame arts students.

  • rifugee@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    To be fair, I suspect the average adult in real life probably only remembers, and uses, 5th grade math.

  • morphballganon@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    So that would put him only a couple years ahead of most republicans

    They have arithmancy but Harry never took it AFAIK

  • beefcat@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    “Arithmancy” is their name for math classes and is mentioned several times throughout the books. It is one of Hermione’s favorite subjects.

    • Microw@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      In the games, arithmancy is portrayed as number puzzles that need to be solved.

      • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        number puzzles that need to be solved.

        In JK Rowling’s mind the number puzzles are things like “How many genders are there?”

        The correct answer, of course, is “Fuck you, JK Rowling, that’s how many.”

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          So crazy that a woman who liberally employed the Polyjuice Potion in her novels and had ghosts who would just wander through the restrooms to talk to you would take some of the most insanely conservative positions on changing your appearance or using the toilet.

          • Microw@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            She has been outspoken on the fact that her positions are basically due to personal trauma and nothing else

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              Had to jog my memory, because I haven’t read these books in nearly 20 years.

              But yeah. I think the Rowling of the mid-90s was relatively chill and fairly progressive, given the tone of her writing. It wasn’t until she got Disney-fied (or, I guess, Warner Brothers’d) that she took a turn. The novels really take a dive in book 5 and her political opinions just get nastier and nastier after that.

              • Numhold@feddit.de
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                10 months ago

                The Norberta reveal actually happens in Deathly Hallows. And frankly, I don‘t see a shift that is connected to the movies. What I actually observed was the overcompensation for criticism two books after the fact (remember Winky?) that Shaun described in his video essay.

        • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Isekai is nothing new. Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are all “isekai”. JK is just a special kind of bad writer.

      • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        It is but I’m not sure why they called the author a witch instead of a shitty author. For whatever stupid detail you find, the writing is 5x more awkward

        Even a dragon would make more sense because of the wealth hoarding

      • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        It’s just fun, it’s not serious or hard fantasy. It could be much worse, a lot of people read Ayn Rand and think its good.

    • unalivejoy@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      He broke down his door, mutilated his cousin, threatened his uncle, then lured Harry away with cake (which was eaten by said cousin).

  • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I mean, the very existence of magic kind of nullifies the concept of math as a means to ascertain objective fact.

    What good is 2+2 when 2 eyes of newt plus 2 legs of frog leads to random quantities of dancing forks with literally no respect as to the how because magic?

    Math can’t quantify a world where physical laws are replaced by literal nonsense, and if math could ultimately explain the mechanics of magic and predict the outcomes of its applications, the magic wouldn’t be magic anymore, it would just be another great force of the universe like gravity or electromagnetism to be mapped by the scientific community.

    • urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      10 months ago

      I always wondered the opposite of the harry potter universe.

      So much of math was difficult to teach or obscure because of difficulties in visualization or computation. Surely there would have been at least one wizard over hundreds of years that could figure out how to use the powers of illusion magic to visualize things? To demonstrate integrals to the unfamiliar? To render a fractal like a julia set?

      Even if magic iteslf followed little internal logic, it could be used as a tool, surely? But that’s the sort of fridge logic (warning tv tropes link) that maybe didn’t belong in a story book like Harry Potter. I had to stop reading anyway around the time house elves were introduced, anyway. I took issue with that stuff even when I was a kid.

    • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      I have often suspected that that’s exactly what it is, there’s even clues of a genetic basis. How such a force can somehow be responsive to specific language is hard to imagine but evidently it can.

      • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        There are laws baked into it, just like the formula proposed above. For whatever reason it’s not only about intent, there are certain quantities of “stuff” needed. How is it that someone like Snape can map out such a specific spell, if it didn’t take some sort of physical dynamics that could be measurable. Spells can’t just solely be about intent, otherwise anyone could yell out “Cowabunga” or something and have it do whatever they are thinking. And I know some of the names have intent baked in them, but not all of them. Some are straight up nonsense. This doesn’t even get into the fact that the wands are a straight up conduit to magic that are controlled more heavily than guns in most nations. Maybe the wizards just hide all the dragons, Phoenix and unicorns like nation states gaurd WMDs. It would be smart, without them most easy magic would be impossible and stuff would really take elbow grease with potions and whatnot.

    • catonwheels@ttrpg.network
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      10 months ago

      Exactly what more than 5th grade math do you need in such world?

      I think a lot of people forget what they learn in 5th grade math. You learn negative numbers. You learn unit conversion, fraction, prime, square roots.

      Would more math help absolutely. Especially with the logic wizard seems to lack. But it is not like many people use higher level math today anyway.