mfrrchris1984
01/12/2022
We know that the formerly superordinate power of rationality crashed, sadly, in June 1901 when Bertrand Russell discovered his deadly contradiction. It was not an ordinary, freestanding, optional contradiction like that which appears when someone remarks idly that <<the weather is fine, even though it is dark and teeming with […]
01/11/2022
Some readers will have registered that we are passing through a period of great strain, difficulty and hardship arising from factors like the Pandemic, the Crisis in Education, Turbulence in the Financial System, Scarce Energy, Climate Change and the War in Ukraine. The gloomiest congenital pessimists may read all this […]
01/10/2022
An Algebra of Knots The previous blog in this series (No. 28) introduced a construction protocol for knots which serves, in effect, as a way of classifying them mathematically. At first sight the construction diagrams arising from this protocol look much neater than typical knots. But the new protocol covers […]
01/09/2022
On Defining Knots The blogs in this series are being offered to stimulate reason… not by preaching or propaganda, but by example, by following reasoning in action —as it “works its magic”, as it “makes a difference” or as it “shines a light”… onto otherwise unexpected, unpromising mathematic dark corners. […]
31/07/2022
The higher maths establishment seem to insist, in effect, that no elementary version of Fermat’s lost theorem will, or could, ever be found. I think this is the best interpretation one can attach to their taboo against any notion that the problem needs to be re-opened. History appears to support […]
30/06/2022
Andrew Wiles solved the master problem whether Fermat’s conjecture was valid more than 25 years ago. He used highly-abstract modern concepts which were miles away from anything Fermat could have known. It was a triumph in a category (i.e. resolving notorious uncertainties) which has been conspicuously neglected for a long […]
31/05/2022
FERMAT REVISITED An initial look at <<What the sum of two seventh powers of natural numbers can’t be>> Oh dear: this instalment was intended to be a routine exposition of the special case when p=7 of the reasoning contained in the second part of Blog 2 (2022) which introduced the […]
02/05/2022
What the sum of two quintic powers of natural numbers can’t be. INTRODUCTION In 2020 the author of this blog posted an elementary proof of a result Pierre de Fermat claimed to have found more than 350 years ago. It had taken the current author twenty-nine years of “bare hands” […]
28/02/2022
How a Peircean interpretation of mathematics leaves room for a second, dazzling 100% abstract logos Charles Peirce said, probably in the 1890s, that mathematics was “the” science of hypothesis. We learnt about this insight many years later when it appeared in an essay in The World of Mathematics which was […]
03/12/2024
These blogs are offered to show the way in which conceptual, reasoning-led maths can generate interesting, sometimes pivotal, results. In an age of awesomely microscopic, awesomely fast, massive, digital electronics, the manipulation of symbolic configurations will —of course— be mainly handed-over to computers. We can no longer expect to distinguish […]
01/11/2024
These blogs are offered to show the way in which conceptual, reasoning-led maths can generate striking, even sometimes major, results. In an age of awesomely microscopic, awesomely fast, massive digital electronics, authentic, traditional maths cannot compete with the latest hardware —if the contest is simply about the dexterity of manipulative […]
01/10/2024
These blogs are intended to show the way in which reasoning-led maths can generate striking, even sometimes major, results. In an age of awesomely microscopic, awesomely fast, digital electronics, authentic, traditional maths cannot compete with the latest hardware —if the contest is simply about the efficiency of complex manipulative process. […]
12/09/2024
These blogs are intended and designed to show the way in which reasoning-led maths can generate striking, even sometimes major, results. In an age of awesomely microscopic, awesomely fast, digital electronics, authentic, traditional maths cannot compete with the latest hardware —if the contest is simply about the efficiency of manipulative […]