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Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017)

theguardian.com

21–30 of 66 posts

Re: Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017)

#21
Alright, I'll bite:

To defend Wildberger a bit (because I am an ultrafinitist) I'd like to state first that Wildberger has poor personal PR ability.

Now, as programmers here, you are all natural ultrafinitists as you work with finite quantities (computer systems) and use numerical methods to accurately approximate real numbers.

An ultrafinitist says that that's really all there is to it. The extra axiomatic fluff about infinities existing are logically unnecessary to do all the heavy lifting of the math that we are familiar with. Wildberger's point (and the point of all ultrafinitist claims) is that it's an intellectual and pedagogical disservice to teach and speak of, e.g. Real Numbers, as if they're actually involving infinite quantities that you can never fully specify. We are always going to have to confront the numerical methods part, so it's better to make teaching about numbers methodologically aligned with how we actually measure and use them.

I have personally been working on building various finite equivalents to familiar math. I recommend anyone to read Radically Elementary Probability Theory by Nelson to get a better sense of how to do finite math, at least at the theoretical level. Once again, on a practical level to do with directly computing quantities, we've only ever done finite math.

Re: Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017)

#22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the context - I was baffled at first how the Guardian would run with the tagline "a trignometric table more accurate than any". But it's because the sine of 60 degrees is said by modern tables to be equal to sqrt(3) / 2, which Wildberger doesn't "believe in", he prefers to state that the square of the sine is actually 3 / 4 and that this is "more accurate". The actual paper is at [1]: [1] https://doi.org/1…

What does Wildberger then think about i = sqrt(-1)? Is this also "not accurate" enough?

Ultrafinitism does not rule out higher algebraic structures

Re: Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017)

#23
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imaginary numbers are not the same thing as irrational numbers

He doesn't work with imaginary numbers, either. He treats complex numbers as matrices of rationals.

Which is the same thing for all intents and purposes.

An ultrafinitist is still allowed to call that 'i'.

Re: Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017)

#24
post #3

It's probably worth adding the context that Wildberger's agenda is to ground mathematics in integers and rational numbers, eliminating those pesky irrationals Euclid introduced, because reasoning about them invariably involves infinities or universal quantifiers, which everyone agrees are tricky and error-prone, even if they don't agree with Wildberger's radical variety of finitism. So he was delighted to find a kind…

How do we do things like electrical engineering without imaginary numbers? Is this method an actual improvement?

Imaginary numbers, quaternions, octonions, Clifford Algebras, etc. can still have finite expressions.

After all, the Cayley-Dickson construction is not an infinite affair.

Re: Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017)

#25
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't. He basically defines numbers like pi and e not as numbers, but as iterative functions, which you can run to whatever level of accuracy that you want. It's sort of a silly argument, because _all_ numbers can be treated like the output of a function, including the real numbers, so he has basically smuggled in all reals through the back door, because any real number can just be thought of as a function with i…

You can't get all the reals that way. The reals that can be produced by an algorithm make up a vanishingly small (e.g. countable) subset. Almost all of the reals are inexpressible.

To an ultrafinitist, there is no such thing as a number that is inexpressible.

Re: Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017)

#26

Alright, I'll bite: To defend Wildberger a bit (because I am an ultrafinitist) I'd like to state first that Wildberger has poor personal PR ability. Now, as programmers here, you are all natural ultrafinitists as you work with finite quantities (computer systems) and use numerical methods to accurately approximate real numbers. An ultrafinitist says that that's really all there is to it. The extra axiomatic fluff abo…

> numbers methodologically aligned with how we actually measure and use them.

We use numbers in compact decimal approximations for convenience. Repeated rational series are cumbersome without an electronic computer and useless for everyday life.

Re: Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017)

#27

Alright, I'll bite: To defend Wildberger a bit (because I am an ultrafinitist) I'd like to state first that Wildberger has poor personal PR ability. Now, as programmers here, you are all natural ultrafinitists as you work with finite quantities (computer systems) and use numerical methods to accurately approximate real numbers. An ultrafinitist says that that's really all there is to it. The extra axiomatic fluff abo…

> numbers methodologically aligned with how we actually measure and use them. We use numbers in compact decimal approximations for convenience. Repeated rational series are cumbersome without an electronic computer and useless for everyday life.

The point is not about restricting what notational conveniences you prefer.

The point is to not confuse the notational convenience with the underlying concept that makes such numbers comprehensible in the first place.

Re: Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017)

#28
>”He bought it from Edgar Banks, a diplomat, antiquities dealer and flamboyant amateur archaeologist said to have inspired the character of Indiana Jones – his feats included climbing Mount Ararat in an unsuccessful attempt to find Noah’s Ark – who had excavated it in southern Iraq in the early 20th century.”

A little off-topic, but as a non native English speaker this sentence in the article made me look up whether there’s scientific consensus that Noah’s Ark has been found and I’d just never heard about it. Turns out there isn’t, and the end of the sentence actually refers to the tablet. Was still a fun rabbit hole to go down.

Re: Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017)

#29

Alright, I'll bite: To defend Wildberger a bit (because I am an ultrafinitist) I'd like to state first that Wildberger has poor personal PR ability. Now, as programmers here, you are all natural ultrafinitists as you work with finite quantities (computer systems) and use numerical methods to accurately approximate real numbers. An ultrafinitist says that that's really all there is to it. The extra axiomatic fluff abo…

So what is the length of the diagonal of a unit square, if not square root of 2? It can’t be rational—how is that rationalized by Wildberger?

Re: Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017)

#30
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get all the reals that way. The reals that can be produced by an algorithm make up a vanishingly small (e.g. countable) subset. Almost all of the reals are inexpressible.

To an ultrafinitist, there is no such thing as a number that is inexpressible.

Right, but to be clear, it's not that ultrafinitists like Wildberger believe that they can express all the real numbers; rather, they believe that those inexpressible real numbers don't actually exist.
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