May
11, 2017 Thursday
Bedtime
Story
Where was Christian Goldbach From?
Last
night I promised you that I would give an example straight out of real
arithmetic that seem to justify Gödel’s second conclusion.
To
reiterate, the second conclusion says that given any axiomatic system like
Principia (or even the existing arithmetic), which is a consistent axiomatic
system of number theory there will be true statements or theorems which cannot
be derived from the system.
Let
us consider the famous Goldbach’s conjecture which to me does not seem to that
famous as almost no one that I know of (any average or smart ape) is aware of
it.
Before
we take up the conjecture, it would be interesting to find about the man after
whom this conjecture has been so named.
Historical
perspective adds an element of human interest to a subject which is totally
abstract and hence is necessary for an engaging bedtime story.
Christian
Goldbach was born way back in 1690 in the port city of Königsberg (present-day
Kaliningrad in Russia) which back then lay in the denomination of
Brandenburg-Prussia.
By
the way, Kaliningrad is the capital city of Kaliningrad Oblast which in spite
of being totally cut off from Russia by Lithuania, Poland and Belarus (thereby
making it an exclave) is a Russian territory.
You
may wonder what the difference is between an exclave and an enclave.
Well…both
are political geographical definitions.
An
enclave is a territory, or a part of it, that is completely surrounded by
territory of another state.
An
exclave is a piece of land which though is a part of a large political country
is physically cut-off from it because of a surrounding foreign country or
countries.
If
you go over carefully these definitions, it is possible for a territory to be
both an enclave and an exclave.
Had
the Nazi Germany not lost the World War II, this region would have belonged to
Germany.
It
was immediately after the war in 1945 at the Potsdam Conference by the
victorious powers (USA, USSR and UK represented by Truman, Stalin and
Churchill/Attlee respectively) that the pie-cutting of the defeated Nazi
Germany was decided.
Potsdam,
by the way, is a city in Germany situated on the river Havel and not far from
Berlin.
Potsdam
conference took place nearly five months after the Yalta conference (Feb 1945)
between the same Big Three but the equations between them was rapidly changing.
It
was as if things were in a state of flux.
For
one, Stalin’s Red Army was rapidly sweeping across the East and Central Europe
setting suspicion and fears of Soviet aggressive expansionism.
The
general election of UK that was held on July 5 gave the British Empire a new Prime
Minister, unseating Churchill and ushering in Clement Attlee.
And
thirdly, on April 12, 1945 President Roosevelt passed away, the top spot by
default being filled up by the then vice-president Harry Truman thanks to the
Twentieth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
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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