Tau versus Pi
16th July 2011
Eric Raymond does a deep dive into geekiness.
If this doesn’t completely pass you by…
If the last century and a half of mathematics has taught us anything, though, it’s that Platonism doesn’t work. Kurt Gödel put the final bullet through its head with his Incompleteness Theorem in the 1930s, but it hat been living on borrowed time ever since Bertrand Russell blew up Frege’s axiomatization of number with a simple paradox in 1902. Mathematical Platonism has since almost disappeared as a philosophical position, but not as a psychological one; I’ve noted before that mathematicians then to be formalists in theory but Platonists in practice. In disputes like ?-vs.? the tension between these positions surfaces, because arguments about the notation of mathematics have a natural tendency to slide over into arguments about its ontology.
… then you will find Eric’s article interesting. If not, not.
Extra Credit: Show how this relates to the Realism vs Nominalism debates of the Middle Ages.
Even More Extra Credit: Show how the Thomistic resolution of the Problem of the Universals can help Eric with his issue.
There Is Nothing New Under The Sun Prize: Show how the Realism vs Nominalism debates of the Middle Ages are currently working their way out in modern politics. (Hint: Take a Real Hard Look at identity politics.)