Serving the Quantitative Finance Community

 
User avatar
Cuchulainn
Posts: 20203
Joined: July 16th, 2004, 7:38 am
Location: 20, 000

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

February 9th, 2021, 1:26 pm

Leonhard Euler had 15 kids and did his best maths when in his sixties.

Funny no one mention Euclid, we used to do a page a day of his Elements.

Geometry emerged as an indispensable part of the standard education of the English gentleman in the eighteenth century; by the Victorian period it was also becoming an important part of the education of artisans, children at Board Schools, colonial subjects and, to a rather lesser degree, women. ... The standard textbook for this purpose was none other than Euclid's The Elements
 
User avatar
Alan
Posts: 2957
Joined: December 19th, 2001, 4:01 am
Location: California
Contact:

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

February 9th, 2021, 4:06 pm


Always interesting how different lines of thought can affect others too - bouncing off each other and generating new ideas. In physics, think of Feynman, but also his PhD advisor, John Archibald Wheeler and all of his students and then down the path to their students.  

Here is a little summary of The doctoral students of Richard Feynman - Physics Today, May 11, 2017 and notes on their work, with links.

Very interesting -- thanks for the link.
 
I see two (non-students) that credit Feynman's influence were Ken Wilson and Stephen Wolfram, two I highly admire.

Feynman's all-time greatest piece of advice
 
User avatar
Cuchulainn
Posts: 20203
Joined: July 16th, 2004, 7:38 am
Location: 20, 000

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

February 10th, 2021, 7:39 pm

"Not all the Los Alamos theories could be tested. Long popular within the Theoretical Division was, for example, a theory that the people of Hungary are Martians. The reasoning went like this: The Martians left their own planet several aeons ago and came to Earth; they landed in what is now Hungary; the tribes of Europe were so primitive and barbarian it was necessary for the Martians to conceal their evolutionary difference or be hacked to pieces. Through the years, the concealment had on the whole been successful, but the Martians had three characteristics too strong to hide: their wanderlust, which found its outlet in the Hungarian gypsy; their language (Hungarian is not related to any of the languages spoken in surrounding countries); and their unearthly intelligence. One had only to look around to see the evidence: Teller, Wigner, Szilard, von Neumann -- Hungarians all. Wigner had designed the first plutonium-production reactors. Szilard had been among the first to suggest that fission could be used to make a bomb. Von Neumann had developed the digital computer. Teller -- moody, tireless, and given to fits of laughter, bursts of anger -- worked long hours and was impatient with what he felt to be the excessively slow advancement of Project Panda, as the hydrogen-bomb development was known. ... Teller had a thick Martian accent. He also had a sense of humor that could penetrate bone."
 
User avatar
Cuchulainn
Posts: 20203
Joined: July 16th, 2004, 7:38 am
Location: 20, 000

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

March 2nd, 2021, 4:05 pm

You're never too young to learn (and teach) maths, even if you are also blind.
All you need is a WHITEBOARD.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-56212929
 
User avatar
katastrofa
Posts: 7430
Joined: August 16th, 2007, 5:36 am
Location: Alpha Centauri

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

March 4th, 2021, 2:55 pm

Shorr's new paper claiming in the abstract "This destroys the RSA cryptosystem.": https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/232.pdf

I believe that there exist an efficient deterministic method of finding primes (without using a quantum computer!) - which is yet to be found itself (what a prime method it shall be!), but Shorr's paper reads overstated and overoptimistic in its estimations and claims even to a layman. I think every researcher should have an expiry date (cf. Atiyah's proff of RH).
 
User avatar
Cuchulainn
Posts: 20203
Joined: July 16th, 2004, 7:38 am
Location: 20, 000

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

March 4th, 2021, 8:58 pm

Shorr's new paper claiming in the abstract "This destroys the RSA cryptosystem.": https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/232.pdf

I believe that there exist an efficient deterministic method of finding primes (without using a quantum computer!) - which is yet to be found itself (what a prime method it shall be!), but Shorr's paper reads overstated and overoptimistic in its estimations and claims even to a layman. I think every researcher should have an expiry date (cf. Atiyah's proff of RH).
Most do, except for Leonhard Euler.
 
User avatar
katastrofa
Posts: 7430
Joined: August 16th, 2007, 5:36 am
Location: Alpha Centauri

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

March 4th, 2021, 11:19 pm

He did the worst thing to natural sciences - crowned mathematics their queen. He's like Hitler compared to Atiyah's and Shorr's little crimes!
 
User avatar
Cuchulainn
Posts: 20203
Joined: July 16th, 2004, 7:38 am
Location: 20, 000

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

March 5th, 2021, 11:38 am

He did the worst thing to natural sciences - crowned mathematics their queen. He's like Hitler compared to Atiyah's and Shorr's little crimes!
Why do you like invoking Godwin's Law?
You need to do some reading up on your Euler.
 
User avatar
Cuchulainn
Posts: 20203
Joined: July 16th, 2004, 7:38 am
Location: 20, 000

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

June 17th, 2021, 3:47 pm

We've all learned (discrete) Newton's method in kindergarten

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_method

It is an iterative method and the nasty surprise is that it is the Euler method!

I suppose that the old-timers didn't have recourse to ODE solvers? Same with Cauchy's gradient descent.
 
User avatar
katastrofa
Posts: 7430
Joined: August 16th, 2007, 5:36 am
Location: Alpha Centauri

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

June 17th, 2021, 4:59 pm

Newton and Euler were the same person??
 
User avatar
Cuchulainn
Posts: 20203
Joined: July 16th, 2004, 7:38 am
Location: 20, 000

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

June 17th, 2021, 7:59 pm

Newton and Euler were the same person??
The acorn doesn’t fall from the tree.
But Lagrange is closer.
 
User avatar
Cuchulainn
Posts: 20203
Joined: July 16th, 2004, 7:38 am
Location: 20, 000

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

June 18th, 2021, 10:22 am

Newton and Euler were the same person??
The acorn doesn’t fall from the tree.
But Lagrange is closer.
Nature is continuous, but the human brain is discrete. Example

1. Gradient descent (discrete), starting point for ML? [$]k = 1,2,3[$]
2. Continuous realisation of 1. [$]0 \lt t \lt \infty[$]
 
User avatar
Cuchulainn
Posts: 20203
Joined: July 16th, 2004, 7:38 am
Location: 20, 000

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

June 22nd, 2021, 10:56 pm

??

Image
 
User avatar
bearish
Posts: 5180
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

June 23rd, 2021, 11:46 pm

As a layman, I’ll offer the explanation that the likely source of your confusion about these Swedish magnetohydrodynamic waves is that they represent physics, merely cloaked in the guise of mathematics.
 
User avatar
Cuchulainn
Posts: 20203
Joined: July 16th, 2004, 7:38 am
Location: 20, 000

Re: Philosophy of Mathematics

June 24th, 2021, 11:38 am

As a layman, I’ll offer the explanation that the likely source of your confusion about these Swedish magnetohydrodynamic waves is that they represent physics, merely cloaked in the guise of mathematics.
That solar wave PDE in [$]z[$] and [$]t[$] is brilliant. The notation should reflect this,