[FRIAM] what is math?

[Roger Critchlow]

So all of FRIAM after my post went to the spam folder.

It struck me that computer programs are ideal artefacts which have
empirical existence.  That is, sort of like math in that they're all
airy-fairy, but then sort of like rocks, too.

If I take a piece of gneiss and break it into pieces, I can send the pieces
to all my fellow geologists and we all can perform experiments on our
individual pieces and come to a Peircian conclusion about the nature of the
rock.  I can do that with a computer program, too, but I just make copies
and send them to my fellow nerds, and we can all perform experiments on our
individual copies and come to a Peircian conclusion about the nature of the
program.

So math proofs and scientific papers were an earlier form of this, but they
don't have an empirical existence, or none that's any help.  We can come to
a Peircian conclusion about the weight and number of pages and density of
type in the manuscript, but we cannot make it run.  You either understand
or you don't, and if you understand, you either agree or you don't.  But
the only real existence of the proof or paper is the subjective experience
of reading the document, which quickly discourages almost everybody.

That's a much different experience than gamers trading riffs to try out at
tricky points in a game, or climate modelers figuring out how to squeeze
another digit of signal out of the noise.  There are still issues of
technical competence, but there is an object of study rather than a subject
of study, and when people share an object of study, they can independently
confirm and extend observations, which can be shared, and so on.  Seems
like a kind of multiplier.

And, of course, some computer programs are just highly refined crap, like
gmail's spam filter.

-- rec --

On Tue, Mar 2, 2021 at 4:21 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:

> Nice article. Steven Strogatz would say it is "the joy of x" - the name of
> one of his books and his podcast (recommendable by the way)
> https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/the-joy-of-x
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org>
> Date: 3/2/21 15:51 (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <Friam at redfish.com>
>
> Subject: [FRIAM] what is math?
>
> This essay seems like a literate summary of discussions that Friam's
> chaotic orbits have visited from time to time.
>
> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-is-mathematics
>
> May you dream that you are awake.
>
> -- rec --
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