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New Comic Book About Logic, Math, and Madness
areYouAHypnotist writes to tell us the New York Times has the scoop on a new comic book about the quest for logical certainty in mathematics. "The story spans the decades from the late 19th century to World War II, a period when the nature of mathematical truth was being furiously debated. The stellar cast, headed up by Bertrand Russell, includes the greatest philosophers, logicians and mathematicians of the era, along with sundry wives and mistresses, plus a couple of homicidal maniacs, an apocryphal barber, and Adolf Hitler."
Reading all those words...turning all those pages. I don't suppose they're going to do a cartoon version? 90..no, make that 60 minutes long, with explosions. Plenty of explosions.
If sex, violence, and drugs didn't bring the kids flocking back to comic books, I'm POSITIVE this will do it.
For those looking for a more fun and lighthearted but still very nerdy comic, Check out the brilliant webcomic "Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" at http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/ One of the my most favorite things I've found on the internets :)
No, it's more like these two Dresden Codak strips:
Dungeons and Discourse
Advanced Dungeons and Discourse
Yes, but unfortunately it's demonstrating Zeno's Paradox, and Captain America never connects.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
That follows only if you think that the logicist system for the foundation of mathematics proposed in the Principia is something "similar" to Fortran and the calculus.
Are you adequate?
So there's that, and from what I could tell there is no mention of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, either. Meh.
It does. Even Von Neumann's reaction to it is included. I had the chance to read the Greek version in august, and it is pretty awesome. Both for computer scientists and mathematicians, it is pure win. I'm so glad that it gets published in English as well now, I would HIGHLY recommend this comic book to any geek.
It seems like there's a disproportionate number of people with bipolar disorder in the ranks of the artistically creative and a disproportionate number of scientific/mathematical geniuses with schizophrenia or schizophrenia-like symptoms.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
This page (Dutch) has a link to the PDF (bottom of the article) of the Dutch translation of the first chapter. (I would have linked to an English translation, but I am not aware of any preview releases.)
I read the first chapter, and found it pretty cool, but also awkward to read it in Dutch, since the characters (in ch. 1) are all Britons or Americans.
Anyway, if you're interested, have a look at it.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
It's my understanding Superman can hold a black hole in his hand while simultaneously writing the formula to prove anything on a blackboard with his other hand.
The Hulk, however, could only hold a black hole in his hand.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Godel is mentioned on the second page of TFA.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
All (correct) mathematical proofs are true, if the axioms are true. However, there's an infinite set of axioms and the only reason you have to believe any of them correspond to the system you are trying to predict is through observation. If you don't have any observations, if you're trying to make a priori knowledge, then your prediction power is thus infintesimal. Or in English, you don't know shit. As for pure mathematics, imagine it a little bit like infinite quantum universes in sci-fi. For every mathmatical result there are other sets of axioms leading to all other possible results. Without excluding axioms you can not exclude any results, so you're only going in circles defining your own results. In English, anything's possible.
Of course in practice you would have to create insane and arbtrary axioms to do this. But "logical" axioms like the set of real numbers or three dimensional space only appear so because of observation and how it reflects the real world. A priori you have no basis to say why one set of axioms should better reflect reality than the other. So I would say the answer is simply false, you can not have meaningful mathematics without context. However, once you do have meaningful axioms through observation you can get many results through mathematics that are non-obvious through observation. Honestly though, you're more heading into philsophy than mathematics once you go that deep.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Your arguments intrigue me and I'd like to subscribe to your....
Nah, just kidding. I'm a graduate mathematics student, and I can't make any sense at all of what you said. Does that mean I've already been conditioned by The Man (TM), and that it's too late for me to understand The Truth (TM)?
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Are you really so feminist that you assume women MUST HAVE contributed somehow, and if they are not mentioned, it must have been because they were unfairly left out of the story? Just why do you find it so unlikely?
Agreed. The problem is you get philosophers that write books about mathematics and physics. They almost always get everything wrong or blow things out of proportion. Things philosophers love to talk about without actually knowing anything about them: quantum physics, logic (especially Godel's Theorems), set theory.
Actually it would matter if mathematics were inconsistent. You can prove any theorem you want in an inconsistent system.
Without googling, name 3 famous women mathematicians.
Infinite God by definition is not restricted to a subjective point of observation.
The GP is playing the subjective/objective game.
Hypatia, Ada Lovelace, Mary Cartwright.
[FUCK BETA]
Actually it means you might want to lookup, say "incompleteness theory". Or the subject of this strip, "Bertrand Rusell". His philosophy's more than worthless but he did some actual work in mathematical logic that you really ought to have seen by now.
And by the way, in this argument the person making it (math is inconsistent) is generally considered "the man", as it's the academic and unassailable viewpoint.
Generally the "radical" viewpoint is the one where "every theory is correct" in some way or another. Supposedly that's what quantum mechanics and multiverse theories say. Well not in reality, of course, but certainly in the spiderman cartoon series. And also in the democrat party. After all, just because it goes wrong 100 times does *not* in fact mean that it will go wrong the 101th time. Anyone who claims different must obviously be a racist !
Actually I mean this.
Literally I mean "For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths* and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent."
* he means the peano axioms (to be exact a small subset of them). In general you could say he means any "reasonable" axiom set that contains a sucessor function, as that's the essential part.