Forum

Check out Einstein crush Oppenheimer

Check out kids doing insane fast calculations using a mental abacus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m6s-ulE6LY&feature=player_embedded Philosophy, Physics, Mathematics - “Dangerous Knowledge” (a BBC documentary on mathematicans gone insane) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5122859998068380459&ei=rXIGS6PPLaKAqwKwpY3kCQ&q=Dangerous+Knowledge+(BBC)+-+Documentary+on+mathematicians+gone+insane&view=3# mathmagician (guy squares 5-digit number in head) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqY_q7riL-w&feature=player_embedded Twin prime conjecture song (NOVA) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsX-SjZXScA&feature=player_embedded NOVA | Hunting the Hidden Dimension "Mysteriously beautiful fractals are shaking up the world of mathematics and deepening our understanding of nature." http://video.pbs.org/video/1050932219/

tx for your invite quark \ Drknownothing. i look forward to your posts and threads :-) ~ amenhotepi

I usually decline group invites without second thought, but I'm glad I read the invite for this one. I love math! It would be great to build up this math/chess community, and I am suggesting posts in this thread about our relationship with math. Do you work as a mathematician, or in a math-related field? Is math just a great hobby and interest of yours? What areas or aspects of math appeal to you? Or are you currently a student studying math? I'm Victor, and I'm currently studying math, working on my Ph.D. My focus is discrete mathematics, which is graph theory and combinatorics for those who know those areas, and is basically fancy counting and picture drawing for those who aren't familiar :) I also am a fan of probability. I tend to favor the pure side of math, and deal less with applications. I look forward to meeting everyone here!

Thank you all for over 100 posts and 500 views of my last forum topic. I hope to make many more good ones. I do not expect this one to be as great, however, but more understandable at least. Ford, Mathematics is pneumatic. I would expect most of us to start, and probably end here. It was interesting for me to see other people's take. For one extreme, Where Mathematics Comes From, by George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez: "The Romance of Mathematics" "In the course of our research, we ran up against a mythology that stood in the way of developing an adequate cognitive science of mathematics. It is a kind of 'romance' of mathematics, a mythology....It is a beautiful romance-the stuff of movies like 2001, Contact, and Sphere.It initially attracted us to mathematics. But the more we apply what we know about congnitive science to understand the cognitive structure of mathematics, the more it has become clear that this romance cannot be true." [pgs. xv-xvi] So now basically these feelings are being equated with Platonism. This is too big of a leap to me to make such an absolute connection. "While their [Lakoff and Nunez's] description of how humans develop concepts of mathematics is consistent with the restricted social constructivism of Hersh, it is also consistent with any reasonable version of platonism that distinguishes between mathematical facts and human knowledge of those mathematical facts." (http://www.maa.org/reviews/wheremath.html) All right, that was semi-off topic, so continuing (ibid): "They [Lakoff and Nunez] assert that they have dealt a fatal blow to what they call the "Romance of Mathematics" (p. 339), roughly what is often referred to as platonism: "Mathematics is an objective feature of the universe ... What human beings believe about mathematics therefore has no effect on what mathematics really is. ... Since logic itself can be formalized as mathematical logic, mathematics characterizes the very nature of rationality. ..." As with many social constructivists (e.g., Reuben Hersh), they dislike this romance because "It intimidates people. ... It helps to maintain an elite and then justify it." (p. 341) Their arguments in favor of "human mathematics" are briefer and no more eloquent than those in Hersh's What is Mathematics, Really? and have little direct connection with the rest of the book. " Then the reply to the above review: http://www.maa.org/reviews/wheremath_reply.html If some don't want the Romance, just what are we going to have? Cognitive math science classes taught at an early level? This could be just as hard or harder than the usual abstraction and might turn even more people off. Your thoughts? P.S., please let's not get into a big fight about intuitionism/platonism yet....

I am a quantum mechanics junky. So I was wondering if anyone here knows, or has even remotely heard of, the following interpretation of the actuality of a wavefunction: 1. Particles can get "hit" by Gaussian Functions over a very long time. 2. There are many particles in a macroscopic system, so the probability of a hit occuring is drastically greater 3. These particles are entangled to their macroscopic object. 4. Hence, if even 1 particle gets hit, the whole system should change 'cause it's entangled. 5. I think this has something to do with a GRW scheme, which I know very little about. So my question: does this validly solve the "Schrodinger's Cat" dillema mathematically, and has anyone else heard of this?

Perhaps you, like myself, learned in grade school some version of this story about the brilliant young Carl Gauss: In the 1780s a provincial German schoolmaster gave his class the tedious assignment of summing the first 100 integers. The teacher's aim was to keep the kids quiet for half an hour, but one young pupil almost immediately produced an answer: 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 98 + 99 + 100 = 5,050. The smart aleck was Carl Friedrich Gauss, who would go on to join the short list of candidates for greatest mathematician ever. Gauss was not a calculating prodigy who added up all those numbers in his head. He had a deeper insight: If you "fold" the series of numbers in the middle and add them in pairs—1 + 100, 2 + 99, 3 + 98, and so on—all the pairs sum to 101. There are 50 such pairs, and so the grand total is simply 50×101. The more general formula, for a list of consecutive numbers from 1 through n, is n(n + 1)/2. Sound familiar? I always assumed the story was true, but it turns out it may not be. For a fascinating read on this subject, go to Brian Hayes' article in American Scientist, here: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/gausss-day-of-reckoning/1 (Be sure to read all 7 sections, it's well worth it!)

Hi all, thanks for allowing me to join this group. I have a question: I am relatively uneducated in math, but fascinated by it and always have been. I want to know if there is a name for a field of math in which numbers are studied so that one can, 'reduce,' the sum of the product of the number when it has been raised to a certain power. As an example, start with the number 8, then multiply by 2, resulting in 16. 1 and 6 make 7. I have found that each number has a series of repeating patterns when studying the solutions. As an example, 8 has a repeating pattern of 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1... I haven't studied these far enough yet to find if the pattern breaks off after a certain power. (I just got into this over the last couple of days.)