“Deep down,” writes mathematician Eugenia Cheng, “maths isn’t about clear answers, but about increasingly nuanced worlds in which we can explore different things being true.”Ĭheng wants the reader to ask again all those “stupid” questions they asked about mathematics as children, and so discover what it feels like to be a real mathematician. Mathematics describes the logical operations of logical worlds, but you can dream up any number of those, and you’re going to need many more than one of them to even come close to modelling the real world. This looks like a twisty and trivial point, but it isn’t. Add one pile of dough to one pile of dough and you get, well, one pile of dough. Let’s start with an obvious trick question: why does one plus one equal two? Well, it often doesn’t.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |