Maybe we need to believe that there is a Mind behind the universe in order to provide guardrails against deeply crazy stuff claiming to be science.
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And here’s the answer to the probability question: What are the chances that Claude and Chloe’s younger child is also a boy?
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A controversy about whether we need language to think pits two MIT scholars against each other: Noam Chomsky (yes) vs. Evelina Fedorenko (no). For a long time, it was only a philosophical issue: Plato saw thinking as a conversation with oneself. If you don’t form concepts into words are you really thinking? Chomsky agreed. But later, neuroscientists like Fedorenko got involved, offering some research findings. Last summer at the New York Times, science writer Carl Zimmer reported, When Dr. Fedorenko began this work in 2009, studies had found that the same brain regions required for language were also active when people reasoned or carried out arithmetic. But Dr. Fedorenko and other researchers discovered that this overlap was a mirage. Part Read More ›
If we want to play around with infinity concepts, we can have fun. But we can’t use them to decide what might or might not happen in our finite universe.
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For example, the baseball player with the highest batting average in any season generally does not do as well the season before or the season after.
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The “strange loop” of life — a loop with no apparent beginning in non-life — was, Robert Rosen concluded, beyond the reach of computing.
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“Evolution” theories about the human mind play a key role in the manufacture of non-knowledge posing as knowledge, and we are urged to treat them as knowledge.
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The limitations created by the nature of computing mean that a mathematician’s true job of discovering novel theorems is quite safe at present.
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Mathematics underlies our entire universe at its most basic level. Correct answers conform to reality. The war on 2 + 2 = 4 is just plain doomed.
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Gödel saw the beauty of numbers and associated them with a transcendent order.
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Chaitin is best known in the math world discovering the remarkable Omega number, which demonstrated the fundamental unknowability of math.
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Whether Platonism is the only possible approach or not, positions like anti-realism seem like an effort to evade the reality of immaterial things.
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Points can be made without sensationalized graphs that undermine the credibility of the argument. Let’s dispose of exploding pie charts.
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If “data science” is a way of teaching math without teaching math, it will just be another way for teachers to fail upward.
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There’s a lot to discover. Recently, scholars learned that the Babylonians were using trigonometry 3700 years ago, centuries before the Greeks.
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Do you recognize the number 1/137.035999206? It might seem arbitrary, but if the fine-structure constant were any higher or lower than it is, you might not exist! On this episode of ID the Future, host Brian Miller kicks off an engaging conversation with Rabbi Elie Feder and Rabbi Aaron Zimmer, hosts of the Physics to God podcast. Feder has a PhD in mathematics and has published articles on graph theory. Zimmer has training in physics, and has studied mathematics, philosophy, and psychology. Both men also have extensive rabbinical training. Through their podcast, Feder and Zimmer invite both secular and religious listeners on a journey through modern physics as they offer rational arguments for an intelligent cause of the universe. In Part 1 of Read More ›
Ours is an age of private truth but math and science both took hold in ages of public truth. Neither of them can survive private truth for long.
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Social justice messaging, right or wrong, is hardly going to help address the fact that American students lag behind most wealthy nations in math.
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The concept of infinity has plagued a great many proofs, both formal and informal. I think that there are two foundational problems at play in most people’s thinking about infinity that causes issues. The first problem people have with infinity is that they treat it as if it were a single value. Because infinity is bigger than all possible natural numbers, people assume that it is bigger than any number, and therefore there is nothing beyond infinity. Therefore, people have the concept that if I have two infinities, then I still have the same number. They believe that 2 * infinity = infinity. However, using that logic can quickly lead to contradictions. This problem is exacerbated by much mathematical notation. People often will Read More ›
Some think math is invented. (See the article by Peter Biles.) Evidence, though, points towards discovery. Simultaneous mathematical discovery supports this viewpoint. Many mathematical breakthroughs are sometimes independently reported by two or more mathematicians at roughly the same time. The most famous is the simultaneous discovery of calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Newton was secretive about his discovery and shared his results with only a few members of the Royal Society. When Leibnitz published his discovery of the calculus, Newton charged him with plagiarism. Today, historians agree that the discoveries were independent of each other. Here are some other lesser-known examples of simultaneous discovery. The Papoulis-Gerchberg Algorithm (PGA). The PGA is an ingenious method for recovering lost Read More ›