This attempt at exposition of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem was inspired or provoked by somebody else’s attempt at the same thing, in a blog post that a friend directed me to (by means of a Twitter message on November 17, 2020). I wanted in response to set the theorem in the context of mathematics rather than computer science.
The last post, “Knottedness,” constructed Alexander’s Horned Sphere and proved, or sketched the proof, that
the horned sphere itself is topologically a sphere, and in particular is simply connected, meaning
it’s path-connected: there’s a path from every point to every other point;
loops contract to points—are null-homotopic;
the space outside of the horned sphere is not simply connected.
This is paradoxical. You would think that if any loop sitting on the horned sphere can be drawn to a point, and any loop outside the horned sphere can be made to sit on the sphere and then drawn to a point, then we ought to be able to get the loop really close to the horned sphere, and let it contract it to a point, just the way it could, if it were actually on the horned sphere.
You would think that, but you would be wrong. Continue reading
If you roll out a lump of clay into a snake, then tie a string loosely around it, can you contort the ends of the snake, without actually pressing them together, so that you cannot get the string off?
You can stretch the clay into a Medusa’s head of snakes, and tangle them as you like, again without letting them touch. If you are allowed to rest the string on the surface of the clay, then you can get it off: you just slide it around and over what was an end of the original snake.
This is a little about mathematics, and a little about writing for the web, but mostly about the nuts and bolts of putting mathematics on the web. I want to record how, mainly with the pandoc program, I have converted some mathematics from a LaTeX file into html. Like “Computer Recovery” then, this post is a laboratory notebook.
The mathematics is a proof of Dirichlet’s 1837 theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions. This is the theorem that, if to some number you keep adding a number that is prime to it, there will be no end to the primes that you encounter in this way.
In the fall of 2017, I created what I propose to consider as being both art and mathematics. Call the art conceptual; the mathematics, expository; here it is, as a booklet of 88 pages, size A5, in pdf format.
More precisely, the work to be considered as both art and mathematics is the middle of the three chapters that make up the booklet. The first chapter is an essay on art, ultimately considering some examples that inspire my own. The last chapter establishes the principle whereby the lists of numbers in Chapter 2 are created.
This past spring, when my university in Istanbul was closed (like all others in Turkey) against the spread of the novel coronavirus, I created for my students an exercise, to serve at least as a distraction for those who could find distraction in learning.
From Weeks & Adkins, Second Course in Algebra, p. 395
The exercise uses no more mathematical tools than may be found in an algebra course in high school; yet it serves the purposes of university mathematics, as I understand them.
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,
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.
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 my 1997 doctoral dissertation, the main idea came as I was lying in bed one Sunday morning. Continue reading
This is an appreciation of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem of 1931. I am provoked by a depreciation of the theorem.
I shall review the mathematics of the theorem, first in outline, later in more detail. The mathematics is difficult. I have trouble reproducing it at will and even just confirming what I have already written about it below (for I am adding these words a year after the original publication of this essay).
The difficulty of Gödel’s mathematics is part of the point of this essay. A person who thinks Gödel’s Theorem is unsurprising is probably a person who does not understand it.
In the “Gödel for Dummies” version of the Theorem, there are mathematical sentences that are both true and unprovable. This requires two points of clarification.
Polytropy 