Saturday 28 June 2008

Random nonsense

My friend is always bothering me with some silly questions
about my beliefs. He claims he is an atheist, he studies developmental and evolutionary biology. He also suspects that I believe in spaghetti and unicorns (?), whatever it means.
Let me just concentrate on the most "important" (at least to some people) question: does God exist ?

There are many opinions on God existence, a lot of them.
For me personally the question if "God exist" is simply ill-defined. Consider the word "exist", Webster's dictionary definition gives: "to have actual being, be". What it means? For me, not much. We just replaced a word "exist" with "be". Some people like to discuss "do we exist?" as well. They can do that, although I'm a big proponent of using the word "exist" only in a context (in fact it is a secondary definition in this dictionary). We say "between any two real numbers, at least one more real number exists". We can also ask if real numbers exist ? If so, where "they" exist ? They are part of our universe, dreams or what ? (Hint: they exist in a set of all sets) The same reasoning we can apply to God: where could God exist ? The answer is pretty obvious to me today: God exists between any two real numbers... in hell :P

Tuesday 17 June 2008

Math-fiction

I came up with a mental exercise today. I will try to predict how mathematics will look in the far future or in no time, it is a math fiction, everything is possible.

Mathematics in the XXII century

A classical mathematical notation will be replaced with a strict machine-friendly format. The concepts like sets and relations will not change, but we will construct sets and relations differently. There is a set-builder notation and it already makes a lot of troubles. A computer-friendly notation would allow automatic syntax checking, inclusion/exclusion test, or even advanced hypothesis verification. The next-generation computer-aided math package will be implemented in TeX 2.0, a new scientific publication language format that will push the cooperation between so called human inteligence to higher levels! Using new math tools we will solve most of the millenium problems with ease. We will clarify complexity theory classes, also write no more than two page long proofs for Riemann and Hodge hypothesis. In the mean time, pentagonal tiles of type 15 will be covering all of our residence floors. The new mathematical tools will be very powerful because we will proof that P is equal to NP or even we will figure out that every algorithm require not more than logarithmic to input data size steps on the so called Big-Bang machine. We will be Big-Banging parallel universes whenever sorting a column in a spreadsheet. Last but not least mathematics will hit the trenches. All those uneducated people (mostly engineers and nature "scientist") will use standarized terminology.

There was a time when "real" mathematics was done with a pencil, paper and fresh mind only, and many mathamaticians actually still believes it is the only way to do it and other tools are only unnecessary complications.
And what do you think about it ?