11–20 of 33 posts
Was this written by _the_ Matt Stone? I only realized that at the very end, which gives this whole thing another dimension. Good read.
Matthew Richard Stone is an American actor, animator, writer, producer, and composer. He is known for co-creating South Park and co-developing the Tony Award-winning musical The Book of Mormon with his creative partner Trey Parker.
One thing I would clarify is that Buddhism, as taught by Buddha, doesn’t have beliefs. It has hypotheses that are proved causally and tasted experiential you during deep attention and awareness. The word used by Buddha is “Ehipassiko”, translated as come and see for yourself.
Carry on with your journey of mathematics and I wish you all the success!
Also, this https://plus.maths.org/content/andrew-wiles-what-does-if-fee... from Andrew Wiles, when he mentions that maths, the actual doing of it at least, isn't so much the cold hard logic of formal equations, that's just how it's communicated. It's the sitting down and trying to grapple with some mathematical ideas when it becomes more akin to musical experience.
iirc, there's a passage in Godel, Escher, Bach where Hofstadter actually works through a mathematical calculation and compares its cadences with musical experience. And there's the poems of Rebecca Elson (Theories of Everything, Explaining Relativity) that do the best job, for me, of describing what is actually appealing about maths.
Like this article, they all emphasise the joy of just sitting down and playing with mathematical ideas. That that is where the understanding and fun really is, though difficult to communicate directly. It's not so much the technical bits of learning formulae and grinding results out of them that, at least when I was at school, was all we ever really did.
It's interesting to consider that people who look for a feeling of one-ness with the world can find it through Mathematics or through religion, even though they are considered almost diametrically opposite approaches to understand the Universe.
For someone who espouses an expertise in mathematics his perspective on religion is quite reductive if not completely wrong in some cases. I guess in addition to math the author is fond of strawman arguments.
It's interesting to consider that people who look for a feeling of one-ness with the world can find it through Mathematics or through religion, even though they are considered almost diametrically opposite approaches to understand the Universe.
It's interesting to consider that people who look for a feeling of one-ness with the world can find it through Mathematics or through religion, even though they are considered almost diametrically opposite approaches to understand the Universe.
That's not how I see it. Mathematics is not science, even though science has found practical uses for certain types of math. Pure math does not require observation of the real world for proof, only consistency with itself. As a system of symbols independent of the messy real world I see it closer to mysticism than hard science. I am not saying this as a bad thing, only something we need to be honest about.
"Islam was out because that’s not for white people." For someone who espouses an expertise in mathematics his perspective on religion is quite reductive if not completely wrong in some cases. I guess in addition to math the author is fond of strawman arguments.
"Islam was out because that’s not for white people." For someone who espouses an expertise in mathematics his perspective on religion is quite reductive if not completely wrong in some cases. I guess in addition to math the author is fond of strawman arguments.