[extropy-chat] What is mathematics REALLY?

[Dirk Bruere]

On 10/22/05, Marc Geddes <marc.geddes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What actually *are* numbers? Here's a very interesting quote from a
> leading mathematician posted on his web-site:
>  "As far as I am aware, no *general* explanation has been put forward as
> to why this should be happening - *i.e.* why elaborate concepts,
> structures and phenomena developed and studied by physicists, such as
> thermodynamic partition functions, quantum harmonic oscillators, spontaneous
> symmetry breaking, 1/ *f* noise, Hagedorn catastrophes, pion-nucleon
> scattering, The Fokker-Planck equation, the Wiener-Khintchine duality
> relation, *etc.* should all be somehow relevant to the purest of pure
> mathematical structures - *the sequence of prime numbers*.
>
> However, some months *before* I became aware of any of the various
> material compiled in the above-mentioned archive, an image emerged out of my
> dream-consciousness, and turned into one of the strangest ideas ever to have
> entered my mind:
>
> *In some previously unexplored context, the familiar 'shape' of the
> sequence of prime numbers is the result of a kind of dynamic or evolutionary
> process. "*
> **
> *http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk/~mwatkins/isoc/briefintro.htm<http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk/%7Emwatkins/isoc/briefintro.htm>
> *
>

http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/toe_frames.html

How on earth could the sequence of prime numbers be 'the result of a kind of
> dynamic' you may ask. Here's a possible clue:
>  "...For years, physicists discontented with the paltry three dimensions
> of space that our senses offer us have been merrily adding extra ones to
> their equations. First there were four, then there were nine. The best bet
> today appears to be ten dimensions of space, with seven of them curled up so
> tightly that we can't see them.
>
> Time, on the other hand, has been largely left alone by the theorists. One
> time dimension is all you need, they say. Add any more and all hell will
> break loose. But in the past couple of years all that has changed. One
> daring physicist-Cumrun Vafa from Harvard-has discovered that an extra time
> dimension could solve more problems than it creates."
>
> http://pvanhove.home.cern.ch/pvanhove/PopularScience/NewScientist/hypertime.html
>


Psi

Dirk
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