Is Math Big or Small?

(chessapig.github.io)

23 points | by robinhouston 20 hours ago

3 comments

  • mkl 1 hour ago
    > When Illustrating a mathematical idea, the first thing you need to decide is the scale.

    I have spent much of my life illustrating mathematical ideas, and scale is never the first thing I decide. Most commonly it stays abstract and there is no scale; it's flexible and I can zoom in and out at will. Sometimes I will choose a scale partway through or towards the end of an explanation, if I want to use a specific analogy, but I can comfortably rescale it to something else - the scale is never fixed.

    Interesting to see such a different view.

  • N_Lens 3 hours ago
    Good article.

    Math is smaller than the smallest and bigger than the biggest.

    • lioeters 2 hours ago
      It's also deep, it goes all the way to the bottom.

      > The world of mathematics is both broad and deep, and we need birds and frogs working together to explore it. -- Freeman Dyson

      • contraposit 34 minutes ago
        Weird Things Happen When Math Gets Too Expressive

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVwQsvof7Hw

        Peano arithmetic is sufficiently expressive enough to be equivalent to any possible future theory of mathematics.

        • lioeters 22 minutes ago
          Even before I started the video, I had a feeling it was going to lead to a kind of "introspective" mathematics that can reason about its own reasoning. I was not disappointed, thank you.

          Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone - https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0340

  • trendbuilder 33 minutes ago
    [dead]