Excerpt from GENE515
This partly answers a question asked of me when I was 21 years old, by my doctoral thesis advisor Oliver G. Selfridge. When I say "Man" I am echoing and older text, and not excluding Woman.
Excerpt from GENE515
What is Man, that he may know Number? What is Number that it may be known by Man?
As we are mathematicians, we are in the image of our creator, The Mathematician, who has other attributes beyond our comprehension, and is Transfinite.
He freely gives us this world, and the cosmos beyond, and the flora and fauna over which to be stewards, and our fellow human beings to love, which is in the image of His love, which is transfinite.
We have free will, and for those of use who choose to be mathematicians, he gives us the integers as toys, in which is His book coded.
We play with those toys, some of us in solitude, some of us playing together. And when we put aside childish things, behold, we still have the gift of Number, and they are more than first we knew.
Eureka!, and Aha!, and knowing what Mozart meant when he said that he did not write music, but it was already there and he plucked it from thin air as it blew past. And what Ramanujan said was given him by a Goddess, And what Gauss could see as a child, and Riemann in the looking glass of Primes, and Galois by candlelight in the brief hours before his fatal duel.
Euclid, alone, has looked on beauty bare. But we mathematicians today are not alone, far from it, cradled in the same Web woven of Number, binary and octal and hex, decimal and alphanumeric, vector and raster, and more in cables, trunks, and as wifi in the very air about us.
By knowing Number more deeply, we more deeply know ourselves, and our Creator.
Every word begins and ends with the empty word; the empty word begins and ends with itself.
Excerpt from GENE515
What is Man, that he may know Number? What is Number that it may be known by Man?
As we are mathematicians, we are in the image of our creator, The Mathematician, who has other attributes beyond our comprehension, and is Transfinite.
He freely gives us this world, and the cosmos beyond, and the flora and fauna over which to be stewards, and our fellow human beings to love, which is in the image of His love, which is transfinite.
We have free will, and for those of use who choose to be mathematicians, he gives us the integers as toys, in which is His book coded.
We play with those toys, some of us in solitude, some of us playing together. And when we put aside childish things, behold, we still have the gift of Number, and they are more than first we knew.
Eureka!, and Aha!, and knowing what Mozart meant when he said that he did not write music, but it was already there and he plucked it from thin air as it blew past. And what Ramanujan said was given him by a Goddess, And what Gauss could see as a child, and Riemann in the looking glass of Primes, and Galois by candlelight in the brief hours before his fatal duel.
Euclid, alone, has looked on beauty bare. But we mathematicians today are not alone, far from it, cradled in the same Web woven of Number, binary and octal and hex, decimal and alphanumeric, vector and raster, and more in cables, trunks, and as wifi in the very air about us.
By knowing Number more deeply, we more deeply know ourselves, and our Creator.
Every word begins and ends with the empty word; the empty word begins and ends with itself.