Thursday, June 11, 2026

Hannah and her Dudebro's

 The fact that it is hard to be rationally discursive about mathematical understanding was already familiar in antiquity, if we are to trust Hannah Arendt. In The Human Condition (1958), she cites Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to defend her claim that the “chief characteristic” of νοῦς “is that its contents cannot be rendered in speech.” But when you dig through the mutually incompatible translations of that passage in Aristotle, you find that he illustrates this elusive quality of νοῦς by comparing it to the immediate perception of a triangle—the paradigm of a mathematician’s understanding, not accessible to ratio, or what the Greeks called λογος.

Knowledge Collapse - Boston Review

So that slippery ratio between means and ends eluded us then. But that's no matter. Tomorrow we'll run faster. Stretch out our arms further. 

LANGLANDS and the FLYSPECK PROJECT

Thomas Callister Hales - Wikipedia

Ray Kurzweil himself has advanced some of his predictions, or at least nudged them along a bit.

And in 2019 Christian Szegedy, then at Google, predicted a superhuman mathematician would emerge by 2029

When the facts change (harrumph )I change my mind ( harrumph.)  What do you do sir Harrumph?

Some of these problems in demonstrating a proof are seriously embodied in the ABC conjecture

The saga began in 2012 when Shinichi Mochizuki at Kyoto University, Japan, claimed to have proved a famous idea called the ABC conjecture, posting a 500-page proof online.

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A sterile academic pursuit

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