July 05, 2019 Friday
Bedtime Story
Wittgenstein's Search for Logical Truths
It was that legendary Ludwig Wittgenstein
who had first applied the term “tautology” to the redundancies of propositional
logic.
Wittgenstein, as you must be well aware
after my series on mathematical logic, was a student of Bertrand Russell of
whom the teacher had pronounced:
He is “perhaps the most perfect example I
have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived: passionate, profound,
intense and dominating.”
Wittgenstein was one of those rare honest
personalities to question the basic foundations of mathematics and delve into
the philosophy of mathematics; a place where even the best of the
mathematicians stay away from.
Although it is said that “Fools rush in
where angels fear to tread” Wittgenstein was no ordinary fool; he was a
maverick in all respects of life.
You may not be able to understand this –
most average apes will not – but thinking and questioning the foundations of
mathematics very deeply and intensely have driven many a minds to insanity.
The search for truth is strewn with
intellectuals who have ended up bitter and morose.
Wittgenstein even felt that other
intellectuals and bright minds around him – and I am talking about the best
European mathematical minds of 1920s such as those in the elitist Cambridge
Moral Science Club and Cambridge Apostles – would serve as an impediment to his
quest to get to the heart of the most fundamental questions of logic and
mathematics.
And true to his beliefs he left academia
(Cambridge) and retreated to a small village called Skjolden now under the supervision
of Luster municipality in Norway and which even today barely houses 200 people.
You can imagine what it must have been like
in 1913 and 1914 when electrical heating appliances were hardly mass
manufactured in a place where winters are intensely cold and wet.
Just in case if you are wondering from
where he got the money from to go on a deep-thinking sabbatical from Cambridge
let me make that clear for you.
When on January 20, 1913 his father Karl
Wittgenstein – who was a friend of Andrew Carnegie and ran a virtual
monopolistic iron and steel industrial empire in the Austro-Hungarian Empire -
passed away Ludwig inherited a vast fortune becoming literally overnight one of
the wealthiest men in Europe.
So money was one thing that he never devoted
a single thought in its pursuit; it was simply irrelevant to him.
It was in this serene, cold and dark village
while writing ‘Notes on Logic’ he wrote:
“All the propositions of logic are
generalizations of tautologies and all generalizations of tautologies are
generalizations of logic.
There are no other logical propositions.”
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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