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so i've been thinking a little bit about how i'd go about introducing someone to math, a few people in portland have expressed interest in something like this. the rest of this will be some messy thinking out loud. a major thing is that there's this large and imo very…
lol i forgot i tweeted about 1 = 0.999... already but whatever this was a better and more detailed discussion https://t.co/0G2pzDuM2P
people insisting that 0.999... can't possibly be equal to 1 is one of the most common math debates on the internet, it constantly recurs over and over and over again, and the temptation if you have a certain amount of math education is to just tell those people they're wrong
@QiaochuYuan i just read Logicomix and thought how much the math crisis resembled theological debate, bc at the heart of it is infinity (and its reciprocal, continuity) which is epistemically equivalent to God, in that its existence can never be directly observed or proved by finite beings
@QiaochuYuan it's possible that reality is in fact discrete and finite and infinity is a handy calculating tool to approximate it, or that reality is continuous and infinite and discrete numerical computation is the only tool we have to calculate beyond our limited mental capacity
@QiaochuYuan what's exciting to me right now is that you're both willing and able to engage in this deep kind of introspection, and i think not scared off by theological imagery, e.g. "seeing why a thing is true directly with your soul" sounds like how we describe direct experiences of God
@QiaochuYuan and the way most people, even most mathematicians, engage with math is more like the blind faith of those who've never had this direct experience and so treat the whole field as a symbolic game, again there are direct parallels in theology
@QiaochuYuan what i see is that you have a very rare and wonderful ability to see both sides of this, and while i wouldn't want to tell you what to do, it would make me so happy to see you use your gift, maybe to write a book, bc there's a rift between math and mysticism that needs healing