NP Alabama Pi

[jporter]

Here's a scoop from Johnson's 2/10/98 NY Times article"

"The ancient followers of the Greek mathematicin Pythagoras declared that
numbers were the basic elements of the universe.Ever since, scientists have
embraced a kind of mathematical creationism: God is a great mathematician,
who declared, 'Let there be numbers!' before getting around to 'let there be
light!'

 "Scientists usually use the notion of God metaphorically. But ultimately,
most of them at least tacitly embrace the philosophy of Plato, who proposed,
rather unscientifically, that numbers ansd mathematical laws are ethereal
ideals, existing outside of space and time in a realm beyond the reach of
human kind.

 "Because the whole point of science is to describe the universe without
invoking the supernatural, the failure to explain rationally the
'unreasonable effectivenes of mathematics,' as the physicist Eugene Wigner
once put it, is something of a scandal, an enormous gap in human
understanding.

 "'We refuse to face this embarrassment,' Reuben Hersh, a mathematician
emeritus of the University of NewMexico in Albuquerque, wrote in his recent
book, *What is Mathematics Really?* (Oxford University Press, 1997). 'Ideal
entities independent of human consciousness violate the empiricism of modern
science,' while science is anchored in observations of the physical world.
Dr. Hersh insists that mathematics is more of a human creation, like
literature, religion or banking.

 "Dr. Hersh's book is one of several recent works contending that
mathematics is not an ethereal essence but comes from people who invented
it. The sentiments presented in the books are not entirely new and the
mathematical puzzle has hardly been solved.But the idea of a human-centered
mathematics may be gaining force and respect....

 "...Gregory J. Chaitin, a mathematician at I.B.M.'s Thomas J.Watson
Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., takes an anti-Platonist stance in
*The Limits of Mathematics* (Springer, 1997). Two Berkeley scientists,
George Lakoff and Raphael E. Nunez, are working on a book tentatively called
*The Mathematical Body,* contending that even the most abstract mathematical
concepts arise from basic human experience - from the way the body interacts
with the world.

  "The authors are all working mathematicians and scientists [ed.- Lakoff is
more widely known as a linguist/cog. scientist, Nunez is a developemental
psychologist], not postmodern critics viewing the territory from afar. They
emphatically reject those who try to dismiss mathematics and science as
arbitrary constructions, or white male Eurocentric folklore. But they are
just as adamant in rejecting what most mathematicians and many scientists
have come to take for granted: the Platonic creed.

  "'The normal notion of pure math is that mthematicians have some kind of
direct pipeline to God's thoughts, to absolute truth,' Dr.Chaitin wrote in
*The Limits of Mathematics.* While scientificknowledge is tentative and
subject to constant revision, mathematics is usually seen as eternal. But
Dr. Chaitin called on his colleagues to abandon mathematical Platonism and
adopt a 'quasi-empirical' approach that treats mathematics as just another
messy experiental science."

There is too much more, including a look at why Pi might not be universal.
The meta-message of the article is that information is a physical entity,
not just the arrangement of physical entities, or sub-systems. It might be
called the physical limit of abstraction.

jody 

From: "Vaska Tumir" <vaska at geocities.com>
Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2000 06:55:24 -0400
To: "jporter" <jp4321 at idt.net>, <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Re: NP Alabama Pi


This does surprise me: the claim or impression that most mathematicians see
their art as absolute thruth.  I use the word "art" because many of them
resist truth-claims for what they do.  Or prefer to call maths an art.
There was quite a discussion about this on the Bhaskar list I mentioned.  As
well as a pretty long article in the NYRB some years back (early to mid
'90s, perhaps I still have it somewhere) that sticks in the mind for exactly
the same reason: I thought it curious how the best of them tend to describe
their theories as metaphors.

But maybe Jody's refering to people who use/apply maths?

Vaska 


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