September
20, 2017 Wednesday
Bedtime
Story
Finally Mathematics and Logic got Connected
Paper
such as “Truth and Proof” are very theoretical and not appealing to most
humans; But not to Alan Turing.
It
was such pure thought provoking papers on mathematical and formal logic that
set the brains of Turing thinking.
As
you will recall, Gottlob Frege would ponder over the disconnect that existed
between Aristotelian logic and mathematics.
Now
finally by 1930s there was a way to generate logic using mathematics which for
the most part arose accidentally as a result of some men of mathematics and
logics trying to clean up foundations of mathematics and its underlying
inconsistencies.
The
paradoxes had to be got rid of.
Far
from having achieved that, logicians discovered even more fundamental
limitations to mathematics.
The
period of history between the first and the World War II was remarkably
interesting both for sciences and mathematics.
These
wars, specially the second, were such that more than weapons and men, information
itself was proving to be crucial.
As
the arena of the war expanded to include all the oceans and different
continents, electronic messages was key to coordinated and secret attacks.
Secrecy
and knowledge would make the difference to an offensive being a success or a colossal
failure.
Cryptography
and code-breaking attained a whole new dimension and relevance and suddenly
mathematicians and logicians became crucial to generals, admirals and
politicians; men who cared as little about pure mathematics as you do.
Probably
the epitome of such cooperation of such disparate men comes in the pictures of
John von Neumann surrounded with American Generals at the Los Alamos
Laboratory.
In
fact, the whole Manhattan Project was symbolic of such cooperation that was led
by Major General Leslie Groves of the United States Army Corps of Engineers and
nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer.
I
think I run myself far ahead of the whole story.
We need to go back; pretty far back.
Let me take to the time of Gottfried
Leibniz of Holy Roman Empire somewhere around 1680 or so.
In a way, those were as exciting times as
today when it comes to the creation of computing devices.
The only difference was that in the
seventeenth century they were all mechanical.
Napier’s bones, logarithmic table and the
slide rule were all invented in that century.
Even bigger breakthrough was Blaise
Pascal’s mechanical calculator in 1642.
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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