a2

"Yeah, this guy proves in his new books that nothing can ever be proven..."

So far, reading was something he had only experienced in books...

(The above is not my line, but it puts a smile on my face.)

If it weren't for technology, the scientist would be lumped with the priest. We believe what serves us, whether or not we understand it all.

Logical consistency, divorced from practical success or failure, is something akin to painting or music. I talked to a chemist today with a doctorate. He had never explored Cantor, Godel, etc. And yet I have no doubt he would annihilate me at applied mathematics. He's recently invented a new form of paint.

Godel and Turing were obsessed with Disney's Snow White. Godel starved himself to death. Turing's last meal was a cyanide apple.

Hilbert spoke of the paradise that Cantor had created for mathematicians. I think Cantor's aleph notation, to mention a detail, is beautiful, but this paradise line amuses me.

I like math largely because it's as finite as we can get. The natural numbers are the bleached bones of pure intellect.

Of course I can't help but respond to words like "transfinite." Up, up, and away! Spengler was right. We want to fly through space that stretches endlessly. Faustian man lives in the future. No wonder Christ is painted so often as an infant. If the Christ infant symbolizes the project (the ideal future), his mother symbolizes the present which is the spatial-emotional matrix of this project. I lump emotion with the spatial because both are hugely important and yet difficult to symbolize. I refer especially to the paradoxes of Zeno and the number line. How many numbers fit on an inch of number line? As many as you want, and then some.

Our future selves are already present as seeds in the dirt of our present selves. Jung wrote this as well. And our dreams hint at what we shall become, to those who can read the signs. I'm not one of them.

I agree that life is complex, that language is a box of melted crayons. That's why my mathematical paradise is an integer as much as a transcendental. Of course the contrast is beautiful. That's why Euler's identity puts a smile on my face. All my favorite numbers arranged like ducks. And these numbers each hint at a different aspect of mathematics. It's as if they all decided to meet in the middle for a press conference.