March 23, 2017 Thursday
Bedtime Story
Writing As a Means to Battle Impermanence
I personally find it very disconcerting when in the process of my
research for bedtime stories I come across minds who have made fundamental
contributions to science, mathematics and logic and of whom I am totally ignorant.
Perhaps that feeling arises because it makes me aware of my
impermanence.
By the way, impermanence or Anitya is the first of the three hall
marks of existence in Buddhist philosophy.
Anyways, I will try to fight against this idea of impermanence
through my bedtime stories and will do my best to revive the stories of
beautiful minds as much as I can.
Writing is the only way that I know of to wage my little battle against
impermanence.
This in spite of being acutely aware of impermanence of both my
own identity and that of my bedtime stories which will disappear once the
servers that hold this data are destroyed either by barbarians or by the
devastation that the forces of nature will inflict upon this fragile planet.
Let us go back to the pioneers of mathematical logic from
philosophy, though it is a relief to know that most of these mathematicians and
logicians were also great philosophers.
It is essentially what Frege started that Gödel completed when it
came to mathematical logic.
Further, the work of Gottlob Frege would go on to inspire even
Alfred Tarski to work on his theory of truth.
Between Gottlob Frege and Kurt Gödel, lay inspiring characters
such as Peano, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead and of course, the
mathematical master piece Principia Mathematica.
I have dealt with them here and there but they will keep popping
up in various contexts.
What Gottlob did was intellectually incredible and yet he was
nearly forgotten had it not been for Giuseppe Peano and Bertrand Russell who
revived his ideas of “concept notation” or propositional calculus.
The notation that Gottlob had devised for propositional calculus
has now largely been replaced.
This is so because his notations were idiosyncratically
two-dimensional and very space consuming and cumbersome.
He used lines to connect the formulas.
It is difficult and very time consuming to draw out the notations
that were used by Gottlob but essentially they were meaningless symbols like
right angled two lines and arrows.
The modern symbols that have replaced his are also meaningless but
probably more convenient and utilitarian.
One of the first great invention of Gottlob Frege was the introduction
of quantifiers or quantification in logic.
We shall take up the quantifiers in the nights to come.
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.
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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:
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