Is math big or small?

mkl•about 6 hours ago

> When Illustrating a mathematical idea, the first thing you need to decide is the scale.

I have spent much of my life illustrating mathematical ideas, and scale is never the first thing I decide. Most commonly it stays abstract and there is no scale; it's flexible and I can zoom in and out at will. Sometimes I will choose a scale partway through or towards the end of an explanation, if I want to use a specific analogy, but I can comfortably rescale it to something else - the scale is never fixed.

Interesting to see such a different view.

aledevv•about 1 hour ago

I propose a further and different "key to understanding."

I would add: the second thing to decide, besides the scale, is the Plan.

What do we mean, for example, by the "Ethical Plan." By ethical plan, I mean the purpose... "WHAT do I use mathematics for"?

Mathematics can be something immensely BIG if I use it for something important. Or it can be miserably SMALL if I use it for something petty and trivial.

In short: even in this case, greatness depends not only on the scale, but also on the eyes of the beholder, on the Context in which it is applied, and, why not?, also on the Purpose and the ethical plan.

If mathematics were, for example, something at the service of Justice, it would be something immensely Big.

eru•less than a minute ago

It sounds like you ain't a fan of recreational mathematics?

seanhunter•about 4 hours ago

Totally agree. I really enjoyed the article, and the illustrations are really cool but scale is just something I don’t even consider. Even the very first question baffled me, when it said “Picture a torus. Is it big or small?”

I answered an unambiguous “yes”.

Also, we haven’t defined measure yet here have we? What does it even mean for something to have scale without measure?

mkl•about 4 hours ago

Right, I immediately saw a torus - it was light blue (that's trivial to change, but I can't have no colour if it's visual) - but it could have been the size of a bacterium or the size of a galaxy. Without any context or application, the size is undefined.

Pay08•about 2 hours ago

> Also, we haven’t defined measure yet here have we?

Kilograms, obviously.

lefra•about 1 hour ago

A first-year physics teacher once told the class something that stuck with me (paraphrasing): "Nothing is big or small by itself. I want you to always follow these words with 'compared to ...'".

fuglede_•about 3 hours ago

I've always loved this recording of Thurston talking about branched coverings and knot complements using big knots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKSrBt2kFD4

N_Lens•about 8 hours ago

Good article.

Math is smaller than the smallest and bigger than the biggest.

lioeters•about 7 hours ago

It's also deep, it goes all the way to the bottom.

> The world of mathematics is both broad and deep, and we need birds and frogs working together to explore it. -- Freeman Dyson

contraposit•about 5 hours ago

Weird Things Happen When Math Gets Too Expressive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVwQsvof7Hw

Peano arithmetic is sufficiently expressive enough to be equivalent to any possible future theory of mathematics.

lioeters•about 5 hours ago

Even before I started the video, I had a feeling it was going to lead to a kind of "introspective" mathematics that can reason about its own reasoning. I was not disappointed, thank you.

Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone - https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0340

volemo•about 3 hours ago

Yes.

Is math big or small?

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