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Brain Injury Turns Man Into Math Genius
mpicpp sends in the story of Jason Padgett, a man who developed extraordinary mathematical abilities as the result of brain trauma when he was attacked outside a bar. "Padgett, a furniture salesman from Tacoma, Wash., who had very little interest in academics, developed the ability to visualize complex mathematical objects and physics concepts intuitively. The injury, while devastating, seems to have unlocked part of his brain that makes everything in his world appear to have a mathematical structure 'I see shapes and angles everywhere in real life' — from the geometry of a rainbow, to the fractals in water spiraling down a drain, Padgett told Live Science." "He describes his vision as 'discrete picture frames with a line connecting them, but still at real speed.' If you think of vision as the brain taking pictures all the time and smoothing them into a video, it's as though Padgett sees the frames without the smoothing. "
Can someone explain to me exactly what is so marvelous about what this dude can supposedly "see"?
A google search reveals a history of his story popping up from time to time - probably whenever he can find a venue to promote himself, and whenever sites like Slashdot get duped into posting about him - but I found nothing that describes anything that he's actually able to intuit about math since this injury other than a bunch of crap about how he can 'see mathematical patterns' now. Awesome - so how about parlaying that into any statement that demonstrates any extraordinary grasp of math? Because in all my searching, I haven't found this dude to have ever said anything that anyone couldn't easily just make up.
I also found this comical link to "End of Pi Found" on some Physics forum:
http://lofi.forum.physorg.com/...
Not sure if it's the same guy but it was posted by a Jason Padgett who says he is a "math/physics student in Washington state", and the Jason Padgett in the article is supposedly from Tacoma, Washington. Note that the post was from 2008 and the article that Slashdot has linked to describes Padgett as a "sophomore in college". Some math genius - still a sophomore in college 6 years later!
Slashdot, why do you waste my time with this crap?
I swear, Slashdot editors are worse than the patent office; they don't do even he smallest amount of verification before rubber stamping what is presented to them and pushing it out.
Perhaps the karaoke did it?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Dozens killed or severely injured trying to learn maths.
Isn't this the plot of the 1996 John Travolta vehicle Phenomenon ?
Padgett dislikes the concept of infinity, because he sees every shape as a finite construction of smaller and smaller units that approach what physicists refer to as the Planck length, thought to be the shortest measurable length.
So, the bang on the head didn't help him improve his abstract thinking after all. How can someone be an "aspiring number theorist" and dislike the concept of infinity? That's like being an aspiring blacksmith and disliking the concept of tempering carbon steel.
Ezekiel 23:20
Practically, the end of Pi is around 760-some digits, where you start to sound like Herman Cain. At that point, diameters won't be more than a Planck length off.
If you're using it for the geometry of the physical world, then you'd be correct. Fortunately however, Pi is used for far more than measuring the physical world.
I would define someone as a "math genius" if they're able to solve previously unsolved problems, and publish results in major, refereed mathematical journals. Has he been publishing papers since his injury, or at the very least, has he been doing well on university level math exams? Nothing in the article seems to suggest this, so I do question the headline.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
ridiculous, That only applies to numbers in base 10
Just imagine a number system of base-pi, or possibly base-rad. Of course, then people would be debating how many digits "10" should be approximated to for useful work (like counting your fingers).
Indeed. And if you define pi as the smallest positive real number whose cosine is -1, the Planck length becomes immaterial.
His math is unchanged, but it *damaged* the ethical part of his brain and now he EXCELS at marketing and con-artistry and I heard he is now going to law school!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
I sense some sarcasm in this post, somehow...
It's considerably smaller than that.
63 decimal places can calculate the circumference of the observable universe to an accuracy of one planck length.
I can't think of a single practical application that would have any need to calculate a distance that large to that level of precision.
You cannot because it's not possible. A 'base' is the number of unique symbols in the number system. You can't have partial symbols; you can have 3 symbols for base 3, and 4 symbols for base 4, but you cannot have 3.1415xxx symbols for base Pi.
You might as well ask what it would be like to have a "base yellow" number system or a "base CmdrTaco" number system. Meaningless.
Wrong, you can have non-integral bases, including base Pi. Your positions each represent Pi, Pi^2, Pi^3 etc
As said in another post he was a math sophomore. The "furniture salesman" is a red herring, what is important is that he had studied math. Not to put him "down" but he does not appear as interesting once you realize that it is something he studied in university.
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You cannot because it's not possible.
To say such a thing, you don't understand what maths is truly about on a very fundemental level. I don't mean this in a bad way. Most people don't because despite the supposed maths eduation one gets they omit this important point. I didn't until very recently.
Maths isn't about "the rules" it's about YOUR rules. You set the rules, and you can set them to be whatever you like. There are generally three results from such an activity:
1. The rules are inconsistent.
2. The rules are trivial.
3. Some interesting patterns emerge.
(3) is what maths is about. You pick some rules and see where they lead you. The thing is rules are not as passive as they seem. Sometimes once you pick some basic rules, the patterns build and build and build. Sometimes they join up to other patterns.
A good example is complex numbers. i is not a real thing. It's just an invention. You can essentially say: I wonder what happens if we have this number i such that i*i=-1. Let's say we'll keep the other rules we know and see what happens.
The result is incredibly rich. Of course, there is no real numer i, such that i*i=-1, but that just plain doesn't matter.
There are others too. Smeone asked what happens if we have a nonzero numer e, such that e*e=0. I believe those are called dual numers. They're neat but do not have the quite astonishingly all-pervasive richness of complex numbers.
Likewise with frational powers. You can't multiply a number by itself half a numer of times, or a negative numer of times. That makes no sense. However, you can take the integers and replae them with fractions, real numbers, complex numbers, matrices and so on just for shits ang giggles and see what happens. Naturally if you're working form integer powers as the premise you need to make sure when they degenreate to simple integers you haven't broken your own rules.
All the rules you know and have seen for such things are merely choices. They are presented as facts because they have by far the most useful and interesting consequenes. But, they're not really facts at all, just choices. It's also nice in that in many cases, it's the most natural way to see what happens when non-integers are used for example as powers.
This even happens to the extent that the cherished fact 1+1=2 is no fact at all. You get interesting things too when 1+1=0, for example and when 2+2=1.
So back to number bases. You can have fractional bases simply beause there's no one to tell you you can't. You an if you want: that's the beauty of maths. The question is, can you figure out a way to make it work?
THAT is maths.
SJW n. One who posts facts.