September 25, 2017 Monday
Bedtime Story
A Deeply Religious Logician
Mathematics is pure logic and since most of
us find mathematics not only difficult but even scary should indicate that human
brain is anything but logical.
In that case, one ought to be forced to
come to the conclusions that since original mathematicians are extremely
logical in their reasoning they are bound to be irreligious.
Here my assumption was that religion will be
rendered meaningless to any mind that follows reason and logic.
Yet again I proved to be wrong.
I was fascinated to know that such a
brilliant logician like Church was deeply religious (Presbyterian Church) till
the very end of his life until his death in 1995.
It is true that many great mathematicians
of the past have too been very religious including the greatest of them.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leonhard Euler,
Carl Friedrich Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, and of course Srinivasa Ramanujan were
all deeply religious even though they may not have been demonstratively so.
I had excused all of them since they were
either pre-Darwinian or during their times the idea of Evolution by Natural
Selection had yet to sink in.
Ramanujan could not be given the luxury of this
doubt but I had considered him to be just an anomaly, as absolute poverty and
religious upbringing can account for it.
None of the above mentioned excuses fit for
Alonzo Church; he came into this planet in the twentieth century that too in
Washington DC obtaining his PhD in mathematics at Princeton under Oswald Veblen
- one of the founding fathers of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
An exceptional student with his very first
paper being on Lorentz transformations I could simply find no reason for him to
being a religious man.
(The story of Hendrik Lorentz is an
immensely engaging one and perhaps someday I will go into it.)
Yet there he was; devoutly religious.
What else is there left to say or argue.
With so many truly great and exceptional
men being religious, now finally I have settled down to reconcile with the fact
that religion is there to stay and will remain a vital part of any culture or
civilization no matter how advanced they are as long as the human brain
essentially remains the same.
Neil deGrasse Tyson sums up this idea very
well:
“7% elite scientists of the United States
are religious and believe in personal god who intervenes in their lives.
Until that number is zero you have nothing
to say to the general public.
These are scientists among us in the National
Academy of Science who are religious and pray to a personal god.
Figure that one out first before you try to
pin point out the general public.
May be there is something in the brain
wiring that positively prevents some people from ever being an atheist.
If that’s the case, in a way they can’t
help it.”
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
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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