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Nation of One

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Just Give Up?
« on: September 11, 2015, 07:49:29 pm »
What if we just give up?

Give up ever trying to understand everything,

Give up ever finding a place in "society".

Lower our expectations and embrace the reality that nothing leads anywhere.

I am going deep into my own mind, and THAT will be my truest contact with reality.

« Last Edit: September 11, 2015, 08:01:26 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Nation of One

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #1 on: September 13, 2015, 08:48:19 am »
What is one to do with one's life?  Ministers sicken me, especially those on TV.  How does this end?  And why is it I lose myself in math and computational science for days and weeks?  Why do I bother generating x as coordinates between 0 and 1?

What's the f-ing point of all this?

And those who do not go mad, how can I ever trust their thinking?  They do as they are told.  Witnessing the innermost hostilities within me, I just wish to be left alone.  I don't want to be bothered by those who are paid a salary to inspect the contents of my head. 

Disgust.  As Thomas Ligotti reminds us, the term nihilist is a word others use to describe someone they see as "negative."  It is not a word someone would use to describe oneself.  And yet I behold this world and I do tend towards despair.  Sometimes I find I am not very interested in what I was interested in the day before.

How does this happen?   When it does happen to me I begin to question the authenticity of those who choose a profession or a career, and I think that perhaps the suicides were further along this path of reflection.  How does one continue to exist when, to a certain extent, one has seen through the great lies, even the greatest lies we tell ourselves to prevent us from coming to conclusions which would paralyze us?

Must nihilism lead to such despair?  Can nihilism be compatible with a sense of humor?  Have I written about this before?

Here I suggest a topic "Laughing At Nothing" but I never seemed to follow through. 

That was back in November of 2014, just about 10 months ago.  I see that I just placed the notes in the Nihilism thread which Holden had created.  Maybe I will just get back to that thread when I just can't become interested in "Numerical Computing in Python"  :-\ ::)
« Last Edit: February 27, 2020, 03:41:16 pm by mike »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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God of Laughter
« Reply #2 on: September 14, 2015, 01:29:00 am »
Please check the files out.You may like them.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
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Holden

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #3 on: September 14, 2015, 01:42:22 am »
Are you a Ye-­Hehist(follower of the God of  Dark Laughter) or the follower of Ai (the God  of Unbearable  and Ubiquitous Sorrow)?(Vide God of Laughter Attachment).I am an Ai-ist :-\
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Nation of One

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #4 on: September 14, 2015, 05:41:04 pm »
Were both of those by Ligotti?

He's obsessed with clowns, old books, and mysterious cults.    :)

I'm not sure which god I would worship.  You would think the one who laughs at its cosmic hoax, I guess.   I certainly wouldn't follow Ai.  Wouldn't that mean that the meaning will be revealed upon its so-called return?

There is a myth, I think it is African in origin, that is kind of similar to that one about Ye-­Heh (that name is suspiciously close to the Tetragrammaton (YHVH), the ancient Hebrew symbol for "God" - in substitution for the original pronunciation forbidden since more than 200 years "B.C.").

There was also that book with the weird symbols in the cave that may have been Hebrew.

Oh, the African myth this reminds me of ... not the one about the mad scientist Yakub who created the "white race" via "grafting" ... no, it was something about the gods creating the world, then, upon realizing what a disaster it was, well, they just went back to sleep ... like forever.

Some of these myths are truer than others, you know, not in the factual and historically accurate sense, but in the sense of explaining a general quality about the Creation itself ... an accident of cosmic proportions.
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #5 on: September 15, 2015, 10:27:12 am »
I wanted to be an Aist because I feel like crying frequently.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
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Holden

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #6 on: September 15, 2015, 10:30:43 am »
One of them is by Liggoti.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #7 on: September 15, 2015, 06:35:44 pm »
I read them both right away.  Thanks.  For whatever reason, I do trust your taste.

I'm kind of in Limbo these days.  I guess I am appreciating having access to computers and literature (and coffee and tobacco and fish).  I even just plugged in a ten dollar keyboard into the small notebook pc and have it hooked HDMI adapter to old VGA monitor on the wall to have more of a "desktop" interface.  These are the little things that are actually rather huge things.  I have a deep appreciation for being able to transform the little "book reading device" into a full-fledged dual-booting system that I can spend hours on.

When I use it to read books, I just unplug everything.  Lately the books I have been going through are the kind I read while taking notes and even typing directly (sage or just python code).... but, you know, when I do get around to reading different kinds of literature, like what you suggested above, well, then I just disconnect keyboard, monitor, and mouse, and lay down somewhere.  These machines are my life now.   I have set up a great learning environment.  It's just a matter of remaining interested enough to continue learning at this point.

I know it is a terribly sad world, a swamp of misery in fact.  Do we laugh or cry?  Trust me, this is a rare moment in my life where I am calm and coherent enough to find satisfaction in just trying to go over things I was exposed to 15 years ago.  It never had to be about rising from a maintenance worker to a scientist.  We are human creatures, and it is a shame one would feel that learning for learning's sake is simply "laziness" or "misguided goofing off" just because one is not serving some company or society in general.


I went down to the ocean today.  I have to say, I am relieved to be back in front of the keyboard.  Maybe so much time to myself - computers, math, and literature - makes me more irritable when I am out there "in society".

I can really understand how one would become Hikikomori.  There is so much to study. 

Does studying mathematics offer you any relief to your sorrow?  I know that it actually has a depressing effect if one looks into areas that have absolutely no interest.  It may be quite a rebellious act to study for the sake of studying, learning and deepening understanding as an end in itself rather than as a career-advancing project.

I guess when you are feeling that way, the last thing you want to do is laugh or hear anyone else laughing.  Hmmm ... and yet I heard somewhere that most comedians and comics are deep thinking and basically sad people.

One of the best paragraphs in literature is from Catcher in the Rye.  I must have mentioned it before.

“You’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many men [and women] have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.” ~ Salinger




By the way, is Srinivasa Ramanujan at all celebrated in India?  I find his life to be inspiring since he was so autodidactic.  Is it true that malnutrition contributed to his demise?  I was warned a long time ago by someone not to become too engrossed in higher mathematics since it could lead to starvation, and that I best learn a trade.   Oh well, it looks like I'm destined for the madhouse! 

Tonight the irony is thick.  I picked up the keyboard to make typing code more relaxing, and I have been going through the basic and simple PA=LDU decomposition with pencil and paper just to go over the concepts in my mind before coding for higher dimensional matrices.  This has been my pattern for years, that I so much want to understand that I don't care how slowly I have to go over each little step of the process ... and over and over and over again. 

Maybe some more ambitious youth would rather commit suicide than end up enduring an existence such as mine, but once I gave up and pretty much "dropped out of the race", I figure I am still free to go about learning at my own pace.  I don't have to justify it.  In a society such as ours, when so many seem mesmerized by television shows such as "Dancing with the stars"  or other goofy crap where the TV personalities are all worked up over some meaningless bullShit, it feels radically subversive to be hiding away in a little corner studying math and computing for no particular reason whatsoever.

What is it most of all that makes you very sad? 

I myself am extremely moody.  I don't even really talk to anyone on the telephone anymore.  I have lost the ability to just shoot the ****.  People aren't really interested in what I think.  Who are old friends anyway?  Do they really know us or do they only know their opinion of us?   I don't want to keep things light and positive!

If I were drinking alcohol, I imagine I would frequently be in bad temper like the Steppenwolf.  Circumstances have forced me to abstain, and I am taking advantage of the clear mind by trying to get my brain to work a little bit.

In the mean time, please do continue to express your honest gripes.  I like to hear your complaints.  I want to know what has you so upset.  I can understand if it is work-related.  The journals i wish to burn are filled with acrimony and resentment against those I had to knock heads with in the work-force.  It's no wonder so many drop out.

Peace.
« Last Edit: September 15, 2015, 11:28:43 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Crazy Tricks that Did Something Weird
« Reply #8 on: September 16, 2015, 07:28:02 am »
 Apologies for the crazy length-only excuse is that its about a man even crazier..

Though he was not a Buddhist- he was an ethnic Brahmin, like me,but there is a form of Buddhism(which originated from Brahmanism after all) so potent, adherents say, that to hear its name spoken is to receive a promise of premature enlightenment, of early freedom from the wheel of incarnations. Something similar is true of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the madman who was born into deep poverty in an obscure part of southern India, who taught himself mathematics from a standard textbook, and in total isolation became a mathematician of such power that a hundred years after his death, at the age of thirty-two, the meaning of much of his work is still a mystery.

The story of Ramanujan is a variation on the same mythopoeic tale related in Star Wars and the New Testament, of a special boy born into adversity. A mother cannot conceive. The Goddess appears in a dream, promising a son through whom the God will speak to his creation. While pregnant, the mother travels to her ancestral home. During the winter solstice, the boy is born, under signs in the heavens that portend great events: his horoscope, cast by his mother, predicts that he will be a genius beset by great suffering. “Svasti Sri,” it reads, “when the moon was near the star Uttirattadi, when Mithuna was in the ascendant, on this auspicious day” Ramanujan is born. And indeed, his will be a short life, full of disaster. Growing up, he is gentle and quiet. Weightless is the word one of his childhood acquaintances uses in Robert Kanigel’s The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan. Beginning in his teenage years, Kanigel writes, Ramanujan “would abruptly vanish(like a Lovecraftian protagonist)… Little subsequently became known” about these disappearances. Around this time, Ramanujan acquires a hoary old text (G. S. Carr’s Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics) that initiates him into the arcana. The Goddess begins to appear to Ramanujan in his dreams, showing him scrolls covered in strange formulae. “Nakkil ezhutinal,” he later said. “She wrote on my tongue.”

With such minimal training, Ramanujan rediscovers the mathematics of the preceding millennia. As he begins to make deep discoveries of his own, he writes to the learned men of the world, but his claims seem too extraordinary to be the product of a sane mind, so they ignore him. One of these letters happens to reach G. H. Hardy, a famous number theorist at Cambridge University and one of the only mathematicians in the world with the right mix of training and temperament to see Ramanujan clearly. Confronted with Ramanujan’s mathematical locutions, such as the one which uses an infinite “continued fraction” to relate e, π, and the golden ratio to one another,Hardy realizes that Ramanujan’s formulae, so weird yet elegant, supercharged with meaning yet concise, “must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them.” So disturbed is Hardy by the genius evident in Ramanujan’s letter that he sends an emissary to the edge of the empire, to India, to bring Ramanujan back to the imperial capital.

At Cambridge, Ramanujan is friendly and funny, easy company, but weird mathematics gushes out of him. He can’t explain the reasoning that leads to his formulae, nor their significance. He seems otherworldly to Hardy, as easy and dexterous with infinite quantities as with a knife and fork. With his intellect finally being fed by a university, Ramanujan’s genius erupts into something never before seen. And then he begins to die. Tuberculosis is suspected and so, in line with the treatment of the day, his doctors force him to live in an open room fully exposed to the English winter. The food the doctors bring him, Ramanujan writes, is inedible: botched curries “as hard as uncooked rice.” His body wastes away until he is little more than a walking skeleton. Then he returns to India, expecting to die. As his last act, he produces the strangest work of his career: a series of mathematical formulae only recently understood. We now know that they grant the bearer passage to the infinite.

I celebrate his madness,though I know for a fact that his widow died in poverty.When Ramanujan died, his jealous mother rejected Janaki, throwing her out of the house poor and unskilled. Janaki was still a girl, uneducated, and after her husband’s death she lived a hard life, even by the standards of southern India. Near the end of her life, she was half-blind and living on a pittance. The government had promised her at least a statue of her husband, whom they recognized as an Indian national hero, but they never delivered...

Think of the final mystery in Ramanujan’s writings: the objects described in his deathbed letter, which Ramanujan called “mock-theta functions.” Their purpose had been a mystery for a hundred years.
Some mathematical functions spit out numbers of such enormousness and in such a torrent that the apparatus of mathematics breaks down; the pile of numbers becomes a hill too steep to climb. Such functions are said to “blow up” to infinity. The purpose of the mock-theta functions, was to clear the path. Using the mock-theta functions, Ramanujan had found a way to carry himself over the infinitely steep hill, all the way to the gates of infinity itself, and then, miraculously, to disappear through a keyhole and come out on the other side. The path though is head-splittingly implausible, but it lays where Ramanujan had said it did.

In 1920, on a bed in Madras, as Ramanujan was contemplating his coming encounter with the infinite, he found a way through.With Ramanujan, there is no book of studio photographs, no paper trail to insert you into his headspace. Paper had been too expensive to buy, so Ramanujan did almost all of his work on a small slate, writing down his highly compressed formulae onto a scrap of paper only after many hours of work, erasing the slate every few seconds. A typical page in one of his three “notebooks”—really just piles of scrap, bound after the fact—contains no words of explanation, just equations, symbols, and strings of digits. Only four photographs of Ramanujan exist, and two of them are nearly identical. He had no children. His family, including his widow, are all dead.

As a boy, Ramanujan discovered that if he skipped along the number line, gathering and adding numbers according to simple patterns, when he arrived at infinity the sum could be a single, sensible number, like one or one hundred, or even π, a number with infinitely many digits that, like the avatars of the Infinite God, Vishnu, can never be fully written down. He discovered the series that yielded the basic trigonometric functions sine and cosine, and realized that the infinite series was the deeper definition not only of these but of all numbers. (In fact, Leonhard Euler had made the same discovery about sine and cosine in the eighteenth century. When Ramanujan found out that he’d been scooped by the great Euler, he was not elated, but ashamed—mortified, even, and hid his work in the roof of his house.)

Askey,a mathematician, bought his collected papers.At first, Askey had found Ramanujan’s math odd and opaque, too eccentric to be of much use. Anyway, it was unrelated to Askey’s main interest, a class of special functions called orthogonal polynomials. They were proving difficult to crack. His research was leading him further and further afield, into an abstruse new area of mathematics, called coding theory, that seemed related to orthogonal polynomials, though he couldn’t discern the point of connection. There was no one in Askey’s math department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with the right expertise, and so, in perplexity, Askey reached out to George Andrews, the hero-mathematician who had just discovered Ramanujan’s final “lost” notebook in a library, in the belongings of another professor, long dead.

The discovery of the lost notebook was the final miracle in the Ramanujan story. “I have a hundred-page, unknown manuscript of Ramanujan in my briefcase,” Andrews told Askey when he arrived in Madison. “You can have a look at it for a nickel.”

Soon, all became clear: Ramanujan had foreseen the problems Askey was facing. Reading from Ramanujan’s spell book, and with Andrews as the medium, Askey compelled the orthogonal polynomials to yield their secrets. But there was weirdness afoot, of a prototypically Ramanujanian variety.

“Ramanujan knew nothing about orthogonal polynomials,” Askey says. And he certainly knew nothing about coding theory, a subject that had come into being years after his death. Yet he seemed to have anticipated that these subjects would one day exist, that they would be interesting to someone, and that there would be problems associated with them that would need to be solved.

The simplest explanation is that Ramanujan was a time traveler from the future.

“It’s completely perplexing,” says Askey. “Since the orthogonal polynomials, I’ve spent much of my time working in Ramanujan’s garden.”

The the 60s another mathematician,Ono, was drawn to Ramanujan’s whiz-bang formulae, but after giving them a once-over, it seemed to him, as it had to Askey, that they weren’t all that deep. They were just “crazy tricks that did something weird.”

Ono’s personal opinion was irrelevant. Ramanujan’s mathematics wasn’t widely taught anymore; no one outside of a few specialists studied him seriously. Though he’d had a brief vogue shortly after his death, in the 1960s, Ramanujan was unfashionable. His body of work consisted of notebooks filled with short formulae, so there was no overarching theory to study, and formula writing had been out of style in serious mathematics for more than a century.The formulists had had their time. They were the sorcerers of math’s prehistory who had discovered the deep connections among the key concepts and encoded them in mathematical haiku. Modern mathematicians-in-training studied modern theorists, technicians who labored over proofs of narrowly defined conjectures, mastered this or that technique, and polished the gleaming apparatus free of fingerprints.

When Ono began to dig a little more deeply into Ramanujan’s formulae, he was surprised at the tangle of roots he encountered below the surface. Ramanujan’s crazy tricks linked up with some of the deepest concepts in math. They could not exist unless they concealed massive theoretical edifices.

Take the tau function, an oddity that Ramanujan discovered and studied during his five years at Cambridge. A function is a mathematical expression that, when fed with a number, produces another number. It’s a machine that takes some raw material and then stretches, compresses, reshapes, or transforms it into something else. Functions embody the relationships between numbers; they are central objects of study in number theory. Ramanujan found the tau function important enough to spend upward of thirty pages in his notebook exploring it, but it was hard for other mathematicians to see why he’d been so interested. On its face, there was nothing special about the tau function. Hardy, Ramanujan’s chief collaborator at Cambridge, worried that the tau function’s homeliness might lead future mathematicians to see it as a mathematical “backwater.” For decades after Ramanujan’s death, it was treated as one.

Then, in the 1960s, a French mathematician named Jean-Pierre Serre realized that the tau function was an unassuming front for a powerful force. Its existence could be explained only if there was a brand-new theory of functions encoded in it. Serre called this theory, suspected but not proven, the Galois representations. Not long after, the Belgian researcher Pierre Deligne proved that the Galois representations actually existed, and in the process clarified that the tau function was deeply connected to algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory. For proving the Galois representations, Deligne won a Fields Medal..

 In 1995, the Galois representations appeared as the key component of Andrew Wiles’s epochal proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, the largest, most notorious open problem in mathematics, which had gone unproved for over three hundred years and was suspected of being unprovable.

“All that, from Serre to the Fields medal to Wiles, is from only about ten or fifteen pages from Ramanujan’s notebooks, out of the hundreds that he wrote,” Ono says. “Which is typical! And in fact, studying the tau function, the British mathematician Louis Mordell proved some properties that were later developed into Hecke algebras and the Langlands program, among the two or three most important developments in twentieth-century math. And that’s from a different five pages of Ramanujan’s work on tau that have no intersection with the previous fifteen. In fact, it might be as short as a page. One page from Ramanujan’s work may have given birth to all that.”

« Last Edit: September 16, 2015, 09:19:25 am by Holden »
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #9 on: September 16, 2015, 11:40:21 am »
Thanks for the information.  I have always wondered about that esoteric representation of sin(x), the one with the fractions ... I am going to look into just that (for now).  I think this would "please the spirits" more than reading the "lost" notebooks of Ramanujan, although, I may browse through them - of course, having confessed repeatedly my limited capacity - focusing first and primarily on this manner of representing sin(x) or euler's constant or PI with these endless series of fractions.

I am curious and fascinated by this.  Thanks again.


The one I am thinking of is sin(x) = x - (x^3 / 3!) + (x^5 / 5!) - (x^7 / 7!) + ...


or, you know, sin(x) = "the sum for k from k=0 to k=infinity" ((-1)^k * x^(1 + 2*k)) / (1 + 2*k)!

From what little I know about Ramanujan - I just found out about him and I will be 50 in 2017 (if the crick don't rise), I think this is related to his work somehow. 
« Last Edit: September 16, 2015, 01:23:47 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #10 on: September 16, 2015, 04:25:15 pm »
You asked what causes me pain-the evil I experience is no accidental or incidental fact in my life, but inescapable, essential. It was my central illusion, to suppose that I was destined to be happy. Evil is primary, good secondary.The good is the objective of desire; but desire itself is painful; hence the underlying motive in desire is to get rid of desire itself. The good is therefore negative, not positive, it is the easing of a burden. Desire starts with an original frustration.   The fact that every desire, in so far as its appeasement is postponed or incomplete -- and of how few of our desires is this not true? -- is partly frustrated, and so contains an element of evil. There is a soul of evil in things good. And then ofcourse there is Will vs Will,all around.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
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Holden

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #11 on: September 16, 2015, 04:40:34 pm »
In Dresden, while busy with the reflections that issued in the World as Will and Idea, S. had studied the Latin translation of the Persian version of the Upanishads made by Anquetil Duperron, and found there views congenial with his own. One was a conviction of the underlying unity of all things, and the illusory character of individuality, even of one's own individuality. 'That art thou' is written on the face of everything we meet. Kant's doctrine of transcendental idealism seemed to Schopenhauer to confirm this thought, for, since space and time are the principles of individuation, if they are subjective creations of the intellect, so is individuality. Space and time are the many-colored glass that stains the white radiance of eternity. Once this glass is broken, once the veil of Maya (illusion) is rent, there is seen to be no difference between a thing that exists here and now and another thing that exists at some remote place in space and time. All reality is a single striving.


Can this idea be applied to math too?If I were to study,say,calculus,would I be gaining knowledge of,say,topology too-in a roundabout way?
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #12 on: September 16, 2015, 05:31:59 pm »
I never thought to apply that theory to math.  You mean, say I am thinking about solving the problem, given a base b and a power a of b, find an exponent n such that a = b^n.  This is the logarithm problem.  When I am thinking about this problem, I might also be studying Cryptography?
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #13 on: September 16, 2015, 05:38:48 pm »
Yes that's what I mean.If you were to apply this theory to math,then what would you say?Think of it as a sort of thought experiment.Will it hold?

For example,you study a certain branch of math &then you take up another ,completely (apparently) unrelated branch-will you find it easier to comprehend the latter thanks to your study of the former virtually unrelated branch?
« Last Edit: September 16, 2015, 05:54:55 pm by Holden »
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Holden

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Re: Just Give Up?
« Reply #14 on: September 16, 2015, 06:11:07 pm »
Just to clarify-I dont mean that if you study a particular brach of math,you would be ,indirectly,studing another unrelated branch of math too,but the WHOLE BODY of MATHEMATICS THAT POSSIBLY EXISTS.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.