A brief survey of recent insights from cognitive science
In the recent “ask me anything” streaming, Noam Chomsky pointed to an interesting problem.
Darwin and Wallace were very puzzled and debated the fact that all humans have arithmetical capacity. [That] it’s just a part of our nature to understand that there are infinitely many natural numbers; that when you add them it works this way and not some other way, and so on. This seems to be a part of universal human nature. They were very puzzled by that because it couldn’t possibly have been selected — since it was never used! …
The foundational crisis in mathematics along with roughly four decades following it, was likely the most fertile period in the history of logic and studies in the foundations. After discovering the set-theoretic paradoxes, such as the paradox of the set of all sets, together with the logical ones, like Russell’s paradox, mathematicians, realizing that the naïve set teory, or Frege’s Grundlagen der Arithmetik cannot do for a consistent basis for mathematics, began to seek for another, more solid foundation. This came also with the justified skepticism in regard to the means employed by Georg Cantor and Richard Dedekind in their…
Mathematics is often believed to bring people to madness. We hear many stories like those about Gödel, Cantor, Nash, and Grothendieck, describing geniuses haunted by insanity that is developing along with their mathematics. And there is something to it. A certain psychologist said that
A paranoid person is irrationally rational. . . . Paranoid thinking is characterized not by illogic, but by a misguided logic, by logic run wild
Mathematics is the paradigm of rationality and maybe if the rationality takes over all of the aspects of life, we can talk of a mental issue. But this time I want…
Canadian mathematician Simon Kochen recalled in his tribute to Kurt Gödel how during his PhD exam, he was asked to name five of Gödel’s theorems. The essence of the question was that each of the theorems either gave birth to a new branch of, or revolutionized, modern mathematical logic. “Proof theory, model theory, recursion theory, set theory, intuitionistic logic - all had been transformed by, or, in certain cases, had gotten their inception from, Gödel’s work” (Goldstein, 2005). But among the brilliant achievements of Kurt Gödel one stands out exceptionally.
One need not to be a practicing mathematician in order…
On August 2. 2020 Cantor’s Paradise published Bruno Campello’s brief critique of Cantor’s approach in transfinite mathematics. The author raises some doubts about Cantor’s debunking Euclid’s 5th principle stating that the whole is greater than the part. Campello gives an interesting argument against Cantor’s reasoning, but it itself raises a number of question marks to say the least. Below I comment on his discussion of the alleged Cantor’s fallacy.
To begin with, Campello says that “Cantor and his epigones believed that, along with a principle of ancient geometry, he was also breaking down an established belief of common sense and…
