29 SEP 2013 by ideonexus
The World is a Function
Kakeru Seki: A fact is somehow related to another fact. Unless you understand these relationships, you won't be a real reporter.
Noriko Hikima: True journalism!
Kakeru Seki: Well, you majored in the humanities.
Noriko Hikima: Yes! That's true--I've studied literature since I was in high school.
Kakeru Seki: You havea lot of catching up to do, then. Let's begin with functions.
Noriko Hikima: Fu...functions? Math? What?
Kakeru Seki: When one thing changes, it influences another thing. A ... 1 
notes
notesAs a programmer I know that algorithms can relate to the real world, and since these algorithms are constructed in computers that ultimately run on bits and boolean logic, then the real world may be imagined to deconstruct to pure mathematics.
12 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Autism as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Diseases and other medical conditions can also have this self-fulfilling property. When medical conditions are widely discussed in the media, people are more likely to identify their symptoms, and doctors are more likely to diagnose (or misdiagnose) them. The best-known case of this in recent years is autism. If you compare the number of children who are diagnosed as autistic64 to the frequency with which the term autism has been used in American newspapers,65 you’ll find that there is an a... 1 notes
notesAs the illness gets more attention, more people are diagnosed with it.
26 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
Mathematics Lies Outside Ourselves
I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our
function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we
prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our "creations," are
simply the notes of our observations.
* * *
Let us suppose that I am giving a lecture on some system of
geometry, such as the ordinary Euclidean geometry, and that I draw figures
on the blackboard to stimulate the imagination of my audience, rough
drawings of straight lines or ... 1 notes
notesWhen teaching mathematics, it does not matter how nice the drawings or the teaching space, the ideas are what's important and they are independent of the teaching method.
26 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
Mathematics is More Popular Than Music and Art
Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because
languages die and mathematical ideas do not. 'Immortality' may be a silly
word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may
mean."
[* * *]
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are
made with ideas.
[* * *]
The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's,
must be b... 1 notes
notesMathematical ideas are more permanent in culture than artistic ones, and more people play in mathematical games without realizing it.
13 DEC 2011 by ideonexus
Francis Bacon on Mathematics
In the mathematics I can report no deficience, except it be that men do not sufficiently understand this excellent use of the pure mathematics, in that they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, they fix it; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract it. So that as tennis is a game of no use in itself, but of great use in respect it maketh a quick eye and a body ready to put itself into all postur...Folksonomies: mathematics
Folksonomies: mathematics
1 notes
notesHe likens it to tennis, not useful in itself, but teaches skills useful elsewhere in life.
04 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Absolute Certainty Will Always Elude Us
There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on surprises. Yet some New Age and religious writers assert that scientists believe that 'what they find is all there is'. Scientists may reject mystic revelations for which there is no evidence except somebody's say-so, but they hardly believe their knowledg...
1 Science has a built-in error-detection mechanism.
19 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Mathematicians Do Math for Its Own Sake
4- As an example, consider the practice of mathematics. Mathematics is in the first place a language in which we discuss those parts of the real world which can be described by numbers or by similar relations of order. But with the workaday business of translating the facts into this language there naturally goes, in those who are good at it, a pleasure in the activity itself. They find the language richer than its bare content; what is translated comes to mean less to them than the logic and...
1 They work the art as if it were poetry, much of it without practical application, but for the beauty of mathematics.
