January 20, 2017 Friday
Bedtime Story
Peano's Exactness of Mind Greatly Impressed Bertrand Russell
Peano had an intense desire to bring mathematics to a high level
of precision and formalism and did his best to remove all disambiguates in it.
This ambition of his is visible in this quote of his where he very
unequivocally pinpoints out the fundamental defect of philosophy and how that
must be avoided at least in mathematics.
“Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics,
although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution.
Ambiguity of language is philosophy’s main source of problems.
That is why it is of the utmost importance to examine attentively
the very words we use.”
Peano also said something extremely important regarding science
(excluding mathematics); that science essentially rests on elementary ideas
that can only be generated either by experience or by induction but not through
deduction.
In his words:
“In every science, after having analyzed the ideas, expressing the
more complicated by means of the more simple, one finds a certain number that
cannot be reduced among them, and that one can define no further.
These are the primitive ideas of science; it is necessary to
acquire them through experience, or through induction; it is impossible to
explain them by deduction.”
Peano’s thoughts and ideas were so deep, intense and precise that
when he met Bertrand Russell just before that famous Paris Congress of
Mathematics of 1900 and presented Russell with his Formulario Mathematico,
Russell left the conference to study this work.
Of course, only a mind like Russell was capable of treasuring the
work of genius such as Peano.
To an average ape like me, Peano’s work would have been
trash.
Just see what Bertrand Russell had to say of Peano:
“He was a man I greatly admired from the moment I met him for the
first time in 1900 at a Congress of Philosophy, which he dominated by the
exactness of his mind.”
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
Advertisements
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
No comments:
Post a Comment