Keeping It Short

One of the shortest Sunday reflections ever, courtesy of Paul Erdös:

"If numbers aren't beautiful, I don't know what is."

The Universe... Even or Odd

I should be writing a blurb about the various 2017 mathy books that have passed my way the last few months, but instead the volume I just finished reading is an older classic, Roy Sorensen’s 2003 A Brief History of the Paradox. Toward the end comes a ‘paradox’ (perhaps known by some as 'the odd universe' paradox) I was unfamiliar with and frankly don’t quite understand, though it doesn't appear too difficult. Am passing it along because some of you may find it interesting (…or be able to explain it better to me!).

Verbatim from the book (I’ve bolded a few bits that I especially have difficulty following):

“Meanwhile, Nelson Goodman kept sharpening the knife of nominalism. In 1951 he published The Structure of Appearances. This book contains a logic of parts and wholes. Goodman denies that there are sets. Instead, there are fusions built up from smaller things. Unlike a set, a fusion has a position in space and time. You can touch a fusion. I’m a fusion. So are you. Goodman’s ‘calculus of individuals’ says that there are only finitely many atomic individuals and that any combination of atoms is an individual. Objects do not need to have all their parts connected, for instance, Alaska and Hawaii are parts of the United States of America. Goodman does not let human intuition dictate what counts as an object; he also thinks that there is the fusion of his ear and the moon. In a seminar Goodman taught at the University of Pennsylvania around 1965, John Robison pointed out that The Structure of Appearances implies an answer to ‘Is the number of individuals in the universe odd or even?’ Since there are only finitely many atoms and each individual is identical to a combination of atoms, there are exactly as many individuals as there are combinations of atoms. If there are n atoms, there are 2n - 1 combinations of individuals. No matter which number we choose for n, 2n - 1 is an odd number. Therefore, the number of individuals in the universe is odd! The exclamation point is not for the oddness per se. Aside from those who think the universe is infinite, people agree that the universe contains either an odd number of individuals or an even number of individuals. What they find absurd is that there could be a proof that the number of individuals is odd. ‘Is the number of individuals in the universe odd or even?’ illustrates the possibility of one good answer being too many. Our expectation is that this question is unanswerable. The lone good answer confounds beliefs about what arguments can accomplish.”

Anyway, seems like an interesting thought exercise to play with.

(If you can explain it any more lucidly in the comments feel free to give it a go. The primary part I'm unclear about is, in the 2nd part that I've bolded, why does the 2nd sentence necessarily follow from the prior sentence?)

Gauss... the Rodney Dangerfield of Mathematics?

A John Golden tweet this weekend reminded me that I should check in on GaussFacts every now-and-then (…like when Trumpsky makes me want to slit my wrists, or, even more assuredly, his) for a few guffaws.

It's one of my favorite ongoing math-humor bits, but truly Gauss gets a lot more respect than Rodney ever did:

http://www.gaussfacts.com/top

or

https://twitter.com/hashtag/gaussfacts?src=hash

The Minds of Brilliant Mathematicians

A Sunday reflection from Kaja Perina in a piece on Alexander Grothendieck:

“The minds of brilliant mathematicians are of perennial fascination. But in the onrushing era of synthetic neurobiology and genomic reconfiguration, the possibility that genius and mental illness are intertwined takes on monumental significance. If scientists are eventually able to alter living brains or edit human embryos with an eye to mitigating conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, do we risk excising brilliant outliers from the gene pool? Isaac Newton, John Nash, and Alexander Grothendieck are low-frequency, high-impact minds; they advanced civilization in the domain on which they trained their high beams. It is worth turning the high beams of scientific inquiry on those same unusual minds.”

Foundations, Randomness, Free Will, the Aaronson Oracle

To end the week, another wonderful new episode from PBS's Infinite Series, this time on the foundations of mathematics:

Also, sort of cool… in the commentary after the episode the show host, Kelsey Houston-Edwards, briefly mentions the Aaronson Oracle, which I was unfamiliar with, and which interactively demonstrates the difficulty of 'randomness.' It's a program from Scott that predicts a choice (generally succeeding well-over half the time, with two possible choices) that you will make in attempting to randomly press two computer keys:

Read a little about it here:

https://github.com/elsehow/aaronson-oracle

...and then try it out here:

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nick/aaronson-oracle/

Crazy... Like A (Cunning, if Unstable, Mentally-Ill) Fox

I suspect one reason Dotard Trump was so willing to let Steve Bannon, Seb Gorka, Reince Priebus (and others) depart his Administration is because of the amount they were leaking, for their own benefit, to the press.
The crazy stories that eke out of this White House, may of course indeed reflect craziness within the West Wing, but more and more they look orchestrated and planted selectively just to see which ones end up reaching manipulated media outlets, thus signifying who is doing the ongoing leaking (which is NOT to say that there isn’t still much real craziness within the Oval Office)… all of which was hinted at by this puzzle post I did just a couple of months back:

https://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2017/08/probably-not-just-coincidence.html

If, alternatively, there is no method to the madness of this White House, then we are left with just pure unstable, narcissistic sociopathy in the midst of enablers. Oy.

Fawnzie Nguyen…

Yesterday afternoon I noticed my Twitter feed popping up with accolades for Fawn Nguyen’s keynote address to the Northwest Mathematics Conference. Unfortunately, it wasn’t recorded so those of us not in attendance have missed out.

I don’t have anything special in the works for posts this week, so it seems like a good time to refer any readers who have never read it to my 2014 interview with Fawn, which has always been one of my favorite interviews here (especially since at the time I knew relatively little about her). The same insightful, funny, inspiring spirit she exhibits on stage (and in writing and in the classroom and on Twitter) comes through I think in her answers here:

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2014/05/fawn-nguyen-passion-personified.html

Also, in the interview I asked her about her favorite own postings of all time and she referenced just one (from 2012), which if you’ve not read before, you must:

http://fawnnguyen.com/you-are-a-girl-female/

Worth noting too that Ms. Nguyen has a book on teaching math coming out in the future.

p.s.… Twitter posters yesterday kept referring to the “last line” of Fawn’s keynote (apparently very memorable and powerful!), but I don’t know what it was??? :-(
So hey, can someone tell us what that line was with maybe enough context to get a full sense of it (or will it not carry as much weight without hearing the talk preceding?). Or, maybe Fawn or someone else can post a transcript of her keynote. Puhhh-leeeeze!

The Darkness of Axioms

A little Sunday reflection from Bernhard Riemann:

“It is well known that geometry presupposes not only the concept of space but also the first fundamental notions for constructions in space as given in advance. It only gives nominal definitions for them, while the essential means of determining them appear in the form of axioms. The relationship of these presumptions is left in the dark; one sees neither whether and in how far their connection is necessary, nor a priori whether it is possible. From Euclid to Legendre, to name the most renowned of modern writers on geometry, this darkness has been lifted neither by the mathematicians nor the philosophers who have laboured upon it.” 

Re-run...

End of another crappy week for America, democracy being dismantled day-by-day; will just re-reference a previous post from 5+ months ago…:

https://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2017/05/americas-future.html

A MacArthur Mathematician

Stanford's Emmanuel Candes was the lone mathematician to win a MacArthur Fellowship award this year:

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-macarthur-genius-candes-20171010-story.html

The Art of Mathematics

Sunday thought:

“Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.” —E. T. Bell

American Tune...

Had no idea that Eva Cassidy had ever recorded Paul Simon's "American Tune"... until today:

Of Birds and Frogs

A well-known passage from Freeman Dyson today:

"Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking... Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time. I happen to be a frog, but many of my best friends are birds."