Category Archives: Mathematics

Poetry and Mathematics

July 5, 2020 – 9:14 pm

This is a meandering record of some reading and thinking of recent weeks, pertaining more or less to the title subjects, of which it may be worth noting that

  • poetry is from ποιέω “make”

  • mathematics is from μανθάνω “learn.”

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Poetry | Tagged | Comments (0)

Doing and Suffering

March 2, 2020 – 6:35 am

Edited March 30, 2020

To do injustice is worse than to suffer it. Socrates proves this to Polus and Callicles in the dialogue of Plato called the Gorgias.

I wish to review the proofs, because I think they are correct, and their result is worth knowing.

Loeb Plato III cover

Or is the result already clear to everybody?

Whom would you rather be: a Muslim in India, under attack by a Hindu mob, or a member of that mob?

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, dialectic, Euclid, Pirsig, Plato | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3)

Salvation

February 24, 2020 – 7:06 am

Because Herman Wouk was going to put physicists in a novel, Richard Feynman advised him to learn calculus: “It’s the language God talks.” I think I know what Feynman meant. Calculus is the means by which we express the laws of the physical universe. This is the universe that, according to the mythology, God brought into existence with such commands as, “Let there be light.” Calculus has allowed us to refine those words of creation from the Biblical account. Credited as a discover of calculus, as well as of physical laws, Isaac Newton was given an epitaph (ultimately not used) by Alexander Pope:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

I don’t know, but maybe Steven Strogatz quotes Pope’s words in his 2019 book, Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe. This is where I found out about Wouk’s visit with Feynman. I saw the book recently (Saturday, February 22, 2020) in Pandora Kitabevi here in Istanbul. I looked in the book for a certain topic that was of interest to me, but did not find it; then I found a serious misunderstanding.

book cover: Steven Strogatz, Infinite Powers Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Archimedes, Calculus, Euclid | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Ordinals

November 16, 2019 – 3:07 am

This is about the ordinal numbers, which (except for the finite ones) are less well known than the real numbers, although theoretically simpler.

The numbers of either kind compose a linear order: they can be arranged in a line, from less to greater. The orders have similarities and differences:

  • Of real numbers,

    • there is no greatest,

    • there is no least,

    • there is a countable dense set (namely the rational numbers),

    • every nonempty set with an upper bound has a least upper bound.

  • Of ordinal numbers,

    • there is no greatest,

    • every nonempty set has a least element,

    • those less than a given one compose a set,

    • every set has a least upper bound.

One can conclude in particular that the ordinals as a whole do not compose a set; they are a proper class. This is the Burali-Forti Paradox.

Diagram of reals as a solid line without endpoints; the ordinals as a sequence of dots, periodically coming to a limit Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (1)

On the Idea of History

October 20, 2019 – 6:48 am

Our environment may influence our feelings, but what we make of those feelings is up to us. Thus we are free; we are not constrained by some fixed “human nature”—or if we are, who is to say what its limits are?


Rembrandt van Rijn (and Workshop?), Dutch, 1606-1669,
The Apostle Paul, c. 1657, oil on canvas,
Widener Collection, National Gallery of Art

Insofar as we humans have come to recognize our freedom, we have done so after thinking that what we did depended on our class—our kind, our sort, even our “race.” We might distinguish three stages of thought about ourselves.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Euclid, History | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

On Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad, Book XVIII

September 20, 2019 – 9:02 am

I analyze Book XVIII of the Iliad into seven scenes.

Branches against sky

  1. Achilles receives from Antilochus the news of Patroclus’s death, and Thetis receives the news from Achilles. She tells him not to fight till she has brought new arms from Mulciber (Chapman’s lines 1–136).

    2. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Grammar, Homer, Principles of Art | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Math, Maugham, and Man

September 1, 2019 – 7:49 am

A human being was once a man. A female of the species was a wife; a male, a were. The latter appeared in werewolf, but also were-eld, which became our world. Our woman comes from wife-man.

That is roughly the history, which I shall review later in a bit more detail. It would be a fallacy to think the history told us how we must use the words “woman” and “man” today. The history does suggest what may happen again: in a world dominated by men, a word like “person,” intended for any human being, may come to have its own meaning dominated by men. Yet again, this is no reason not to try to make our language better.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Language, Maugham, Plato | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)

NL I: “Body and Mind” Again

August 17, 2019 – 8:58 am

Index to this series

“We are beginning an inquiry into civilization,” writes Collingwood, “and the revolt against it which is the most conspicuous thing going on at the present time.” The time is the early 1940s.

Human tourists photographing sculptured supine blue ape with chrome testicles outside the Intercontinental Hotel, Prague Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, New Leviathan, Plato | Tagged , , , | Comments (8)

Elliptical Affinity

April 17, 2019 – 2:21 pm

After Descartes gave geometry the power of algebra in 1637, a purely geometrical theorem of Apollonius that is both useful and beautiful was forgotten. This is what I conclude from looking at texts from the seventeenth century on.

In ellipse, colored triangles move to illustrate theorem Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Conic Sections, Descartes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (5)

Piety

March 14, 2019 – 9:33 pm

The post below is a way to record a passage in the Euthyphro where Socrates say something true and important about mathematics. The passage is on a list of Platonic passages that I recently found, having written it in a notebook on May 23, 2018. The other passages are in the Republic; Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Homer, Nesin Mathematics Village, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato, Strunk and White | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (2)