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The Man Who Knew Infinity
- atemerev 11y agoThank you. I really needed something to counter the horror of "The Imitation Game". The fact that the latter had got universal acclaim and many awards really scares me. A lot.
- lucb1e 11y agoIt's one of my favorite recent (say, >=2013) movies actually, perhaps even my favorite. I would ask why you call it a 'horror' but I suppose opinions just differ and there might be a great many things one could list about it being bad. Instead, I would like to know why do you say it scares you that it received awards. Like, would you rather contentless movies like Divergent or The Hunger Games got all the awards?
- jessriedel 11y agoFrom the same blog, here's what's wrong with The Imitation Game. http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=7365 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=7365
- atemerev 11y agoBecause it has almost nothing to do with actual life and passion of Alan Turing, who was infinitely more interesting person than that cliché Asperger type depicted in the movie.
- logicrook 11y agoNothing to do with the movie, but I thought his autistic aspects to be violently hilarious when reading more about him. He seemed to be at times completely oblivious of social implications and rules, which gave many great anecdotes to punctuate his life.
- moomin 11y agoSeriously, those are not content-free movies. You're just not the target market. But you want to look at what got no awards while The Imitation Game cleaned up? Selma, a movie with way more relevance to America than TIG. But I'm guessing you're not in the target market for that either. (And also, as others have already pointed out, the content is bad.)
- logicrook 11y agoTo rephrase you question, do you prefer something stupid, or something stupid that pretends to be clever (and sully something you like)? Also, false dichotomy.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jamesjyu 11y agoI also highly recommend the book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BW4VEGM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BW4VEGM/ref=dp-kindle-re... Can't wait to watch this when it comes out.
- misiti3780 11y agoI was kinda disappointed by the book, but the movie sounds really awesome.
- rckrd 11y agoAs a side note - I had the chance to take a class with the author of this blog, Professor Woit, and would highly recommend his blog even for those not actively studying math.
- jejones3141 11y agoOK, I'm blushing, because at first I thought it was going to be about Georg Cantor. I can still hope, I guess.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoInfinity's pretty big, there's lots of room for people to know it.
- KKKKkkkk1 11y agoAt least based on Wikipedia, Cantor's life would make a lousy movie. The first half of his career was consumed by petty academic politics, and in the second half he lost interest in mathematics. Curiously, if we believe Wikipedia, Kronecker came up with the idea of constructive mathematics specifically in order to stymie Cantor. I always had the suspicion that constructivism was all about a distinction without a difference.
- fusiongyro 11y agoThat's pretty far from what I get from the Wikipedia article. Kronecker sounds genuinely concerned about constructivism, not like he was disingenuously plotting the downfall of Cantor, which seems to be what you got from it. Constructivism has an important difference from non-constructivist math: it is computable. The math you can do with assistance from a theorem prover such as Coq is constructivist math. In fact, one of the labs in Pierce's _Software Foundations_, you get to show for yourself how various formulations of classical logic create problems. https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/current/Logic.html#lab223 https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/current/Logic.html#la... I think (in constrast to my friend teaching the class on theorem proving) that there is still room for non-constructivist math, but I can see why one would prefer constructivist math. We have computers.
- fpoling 11y agoI see non-constructivist math not much different from theology. That is assume something that cannot be experimentally observable or constructable and then apply logic.
- grghk 11y agoNot Cantor I guess.
- okket 11y agoCompletely offtopic, except for math and title, but highly recommended while waiting for the movie: "How To Count Past Infinity" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrU9YDoXE88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrU9YDoXE88
- uptownfunk 11y agoThe book was great! I am so excited we're getting to see this made into a movie. Very excited it's coming soon to the states. Coming from a similar cultural context as Ramanujan, I appreciated some of the details given by Kanigel in his book.
- colanderman 11y agoI've always understood Ramanujan to be known less for "knowing infinity" than for "knowing" all the positive integers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan#Hardy.E2.80.93Ramanujan_number_1729 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan#Hardy.E2.8...
- dominotw 11y agoI read a book about his life, it was a cool insight into life of a brahmin boy under british rule.
- amelius 11y agoUsing "infinity" in the place of a number in mathematical formulas is, in my view, a kind of hack made by mathematicians. Infinity is a concept, not a number.
- banach2 11y agoAs long as you're careful, you can treat infinity as a number. It lacks some nice properties but can allow you to clean up a lot of statements. For instance if you want to define a measure on some sigma algebra, it's useful to be able to let some sets have infinite measure. Analogously, you may have a function that has an integral, but one which does not converge. Anyway, numbers aren't real. They're all "concepts", so, as long as our statements are consistent, we can do what we want!
- justifier 11y agowhat is an example of a mathematician using infinity as a number?