That reminds me of Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred North’s great proclamation after spending scores of pages to prove 1+1=2: “The above proposition is occasionally useful.”

(Source: fyeahengineeringprofessor, via fuckyeahmath)

As Vi Hart—whom I have a giant nerdcrush on—would say, “Don’t forget to draw and label your axis!”

Logicomix is a essentially a biographical graphic novel of 60 years of Bertrand Russell’s life, spanning his birth to the beginning of World War II. It follows his work on trying to use logic, and eventually set theory, to create a formal foundation for mathematics that both uses few or no assumptions and is logically consistent.  It discusses his collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead on the Principia Mathematica, the first and only volume of their work to meet these goals.  This is contrasted with his fear of madness — an alarmingly common trait of logicians — and his blunders in his personal life.  It also contrasts the great quest to find bedrock principals for math with the debate over going to war against Nazi Germany (Russell was himself a militant pacifist in World War I but declared that war against the Third Reich was the lesser of two evils).  There is also an apt comparison to the greek tragedy Oresteia.

It also discusses the contradiction of looking for fewer and fewer axioms for math while simultaneously taking 362 pages to prove “1+1=2.”

I do have a few issues with the book. For one thing it, like many math histories obsesses over the “Great Men” who were involved. And certainly it is true there were great men in mathematics but collective obsession over it is something of an annoyance (For instance, the Pythagorean theorem predates Pythagorus in many cultures including those of China and India).  Additionally the history is perhaps too short to be a complete history of logic.  By essentially turning von Neumann into a punchline by ignoring the rationality of game theory and the practicality of the computer it has essentially come away with a negative impression of logic and logicians, a fact the book rightly notes.  In fact logic was not damned and continues in computer science, economics, math, law, and a host of other subjects. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem only damned the further study of the foundations of math and to imply otherwise is a disservice to the reader.

However, I was surprised that any of the concepts of both logic and math that Russell’s work concerned itself with were actually involved in the book and that they take the effort to rigorously explain these concepts.  In addition, the artist(s) of the book did some pretty impressive things with non-standard panels and an especially good page where Russell attempts to explain to Whitehead’s son about death.  Overall it was a very good read, and one that I think.  I leave you with this lame attempt at a math joke:

For:
Anyone who loves comics, set C
Anyone who loves math, set M
Logicomix is the perfect read for C∩M.

Thank you, good night. Tip your waitresses and try the veal.

Woah.

Staples fails math forever.

I would TOTALLY play Strip Conway’s Game of Life or Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Although the former is pretty much impossible and in the latter everyone would play Tit-For-Tat.  There’s a joke in there somewhere…

Nonexistent, like dividing by zero.

Proof: Math is Beautiful (a Mandelbrot set)

Seriously folks. They proved 1+1=2.

So after being bored for a few hours with my white board yesterday and watching Planetes and The Big Bang Theory season one DVDs, I decided to continue playing around with Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock using the game theory skills I picked up in college. This is a graph of the five strategies and their proportion of a given population over time, given that a full 100% of that population plays Rock in the first round. It’s actually a pretty interesting variant of RPS since a given player will either be indifferent switching or prefer switching strategies. As a result it createssome pretty funky oscillation dynamics.

I really like having a white board again.