List: Poets Who Wrote Mysteries
1. Jacques Roubaud - "Our Beautiful Heroine"
2. Gertrude Stein - "Blood on the Dining Room Floor"
3. Kenneth Fearing - "The Big Clock"
4. A.A.Milne - "The Red House Mystery"
5. Jack Spicer - "The Tower of Babel"
Special Mention:
Cecil Day Lewis
2. Gertrude Stein - "Blood on the Dining Room Floor"
3. Kenneth Fearing - "The Big Clock"
4. A.A.Milne - "The Red House Mystery"
5. Jack Spicer - "The Tower of Babel"
Special Mention:
Cecil Day Lewis
posted by Cheshire Cat at 1:59 PM
19 Comments:
when can I expect a post in coherent prose, not a list and longer than ten lines?
oh I know, Cheshire Cat who wrote mysteries
Cheshire Cats are lazy. They do nothing better than grin and disappear.
However, if there's someone who's really interested in a reasonable-size coherent post from me, they might just be in for a surprise...
so the post will just appear and disappear like the cat? And the grin is the last thing that dissappears?
I'm confident that Blogger will manage the appearances and disappearances on its own, without any interference from me. As for the grin, I keep it on in tribute to a certain Russian novelist...
"a certain Russian novelist"
Nabokov?
Came here via your comment on Antonia's blog. Yes, it is somewhat strange that a literaturist like yourself should be studying mathematics :-)
No, Grin actually, A.S.Grin :)
I remember reading about him in an encyclopedia more than a decade back, and I have a high tolerance for escapist fantasy, but haven't managed to find anything by him yet.
As for the math, well, talking about that would be a way to ensure I have no readers at all :)
escapist fantasy. ha!
laughing and disappearing
by the way I did not know Grin...
admitting failure :)
Oh, you might be surprised how many visitors you'd acquire / keep. Antonia rabbits on about philosophy in great detail, we put up with it gracefully ;-)
I'll start you off: is the odd fact that prime numbers are all either 6N+1 or 6N-1 necessarily true or just an immense coincidence (meaning: are there or could there be primes that don't fit the pattern?)
Udge, thanks, that's encouraging :) As for your specific question, yes, that's necessarily true. Numbers of the form 6N or 6N + 2 or 6N + 4 are even, numbers of the form 6N + 3 are divisible by 3. So prime numbers are left with very little choice - they need to be either 6N + 1 or 6N + 5(which is the same as being 6(N + 1) - 1). I must say, though, that they manage to be rather creative in the patterns they form despite these constraints...
I think your definition of math is a good one - we seek to distinguish immense coincidences from what is necessarily true. It can be extremely hard, even for quite simple questions... For instance, consider the following. Pick any number N. If N is even, divide by 2, else multiply by 3 and add 1. Now repeat this process with the new number, and the next, and the next... Do we always eventually get to 1, irrespective of which number N we start with?
Nobody knows.
haha udge...each of us has its own geekiness
After my mathsteacher told me he does not let me fail when I promise not to study maths one of the first classes in philosophy I did was on Frege's Foundation's of Arithmetics which was very interesting and gave me real headache. It was about reducing mathematical axioms to logical truth and he was pondering a lot about what is a number and I learnt a lot from it,not about the mathematical stuff obviously, but rather about clarity of thinking, stringency and diligence....and it was interesting, to think of what is the esssence of a numer, what it really entails...
but everything that's more difficult than percentage calculation is beyond me....
at least, what we share is the necessary truth....
I love Frege. And Cantor too - guys who thought through to the foundation of things, crossing the boundary between philosophy and mathematics... Philosophy, logic, mathematics - it's a continuum.
The comments are slightly more interesting than the post.
:D
Perhaps more than slightly.
The pattern of the 6N+-1 being prime or not is indeed very interesting. I wrote a program once to start at N=1 and test whether the results were prime or not. I let it run up to about 14,000 and came to the conclusion that there was either no pattern, or that it was on a staggeringly large magnitude of digits (like searching for repeats in the expansion of Pi).
If you'd found a pattern, it would have been astonishing. Mathematics often use the heuristic that beyond the constraints primes must necessarily satisfy, such as being 6N +/- 1, they are distributed more or less randomly.
My intuition about your "simple question" is that it will always land at one, because I am quite certain that the N*3+1 will necessarily at some point land on a power of two. (I do understand the difference between looking at examples and finding theoretical proof :-) hence my question about the immense coincidences; on the other hand examples can be pretty useful. I shall write a little programm to test this in my coffee break tomorrow morning.)
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