Philosophy
So begins this David Malone tour-de-force tribute to four geniuses who dared to confront the nature of the rules underlying all mathematics, logic and science, and saw in their various ways that the certainty with which we had become so familiar and comfortable was but an illusion.
Their stories are both inspiring and tragic. These men, Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, were all destined for intellectual fame and greatness, if only posthumously, but because of the nature of their research, because of the intense dedication that their academic problems demanded of them, because of the great resistance they had to overcome from detractors, and because of the major threat they posed to our most foundational beliefs, they came to the brink of madness, and their ends were all tragic, lonely and regrettable. For all of that, however, and however briefly, they each got a glimpse of a reality few, if any of us, will ever get to experience.
This is, quite possibly, the best thing you may do for your brain this week...
And for another masterpiece on Alan Turing's intellectual contributions, check out Jim Al-Khalili's The Secret Life of Chaos.
- Turing's Biographer's Dilemma: How Much Are You Required To Tell When You Are Required To Tell It?
Continuing our Turing Week theme, here's a post originally up in 2006: I'm writing on Descartes for a series of biographies of famous mathematicians designed for the middle and high school reader. Before I accepted the assignment, I was given...
- Turing's Biographer's Dilemma: How Much Are You Required To Tell When You Are Required To Tell It?
I'm writing on Descartes for a series of biographies of famous mathematicians designed for the high school reader. Before I accepted the assignment, I was given a list of figures still needing authors and one that piqued my interest was Alan Turning....
- Happy Birthday, Alan Turing
The modern world runs on computers, and the idea of modern computers owes its birth particularly to Alan Turing, a British polymath (philosopher, mathematician, computer science visionary, mathematical biologist, marathon runner, etc.) whose ideas would...
- Alan Turing Pardoned
"Father Of Artificial Intelligence To Be Pardoned For Being Gay" by George Dvorsky July 23rd, 2013 io9 Back in 1952, mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing was convicted for gross indecency — the standard criminal charge for homosexuality....
- Comic Book And Logical Certainty
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou ISBN-10: 0747597200 ISBN-13: 978-0747597209 "Algorithm and Blues" by Jim Holt September 27th, 2009 New York Times Well, this is unexpected — a comic book about...
Philosophy
Dangerous Knowledge
Beneath the surface of the world are the rules of science, but beneath them there is a far deeper set of rules, a matrix of pure mathematics, which explains the nature of the rules of science...
So begins this David Malone tour-de-force tribute to four geniuses who dared to confront the nature of the rules underlying all mathematics, logic and science, and saw in their various ways that the certainty with which we had become so familiar and comfortable was but an illusion.
Their stories are both inspiring and tragic. These men, Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, were all destined for intellectual fame and greatness, if only posthumously, but because of the nature of their research, because of the intense dedication that their academic problems demanded of them, because of the great resistance they had to overcome from detractors, and because of the major threat they posed to our most foundational beliefs, they came to the brink of madness, and their ends were all tragic, lonely and regrettable. For all of that, however, and however briefly, they each got a glimpse of a reality few, if any of us, will ever get to experience.
This is, quite possibly, the best thing you may do for your brain this week...
And for another masterpiece on Alan Turing's intellectual contributions, check out Jim Al-Khalili's The Secret Life of Chaos.
- Turing's Biographer's Dilemma: How Much Are You Required To Tell When You Are Required To Tell It?
Continuing our Turing Week theme, here's a post originally up in 2006: I'm writing on Descartes for a series of biographies of famous mathematicians designed for the middle and high school reader. Before I accepted the assignment, I was given...
- Turing's Biographer's Dilemma: How Much Are You Required To Tell When You Are Required To Tell It?
I'm writing on Descartes for a series of biographies of famous mathematicians designed for the high school reader. Before I accepted the assignment, I was given a list of figures still needing authors and one that piqued my interest was Alan Turning....
- Happy Birthday, Alan Turing
The modern world runs on computers, and the idea of modern computers owes its birth particularly to Alan Turing, a British polymath (philosopher, mathematician, computer science visionary, mathematical biologist, marathon runner, etc.) whose ideas would...
- Alan Turing Pardoned
"Father Of Artificial Intelligence To Be Pardoned For Being Gay" by George Dvorsky July 23rd, 2013 io9 Back in 1952, mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing was convicted for gross indecency — the standard criminal charge for homosexuality....
- Comic Book And Logical Certainty
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou ISBN-10: 0747597200 ISBN-13: 978-0747597209 "Algorithm and Blues" by Jim Holt September 27th, 2009 New York Times Well, this is unexpected — a comic book about...