Interesting Links for 3-10-2011

[andrewducker]

• This is how they gerrymander homeless children
  (tags: uk homeless housing politics)


• Why the world envies Mr Osborne
  (tags: GeorgeOsborne finance politics uk)


• Rick Perry's hunting ranch is called....Niggerhead.
  (tags: usa RickPerry racism politics)


• Homemade GPS Receiver
  (tags: GPS Electronics)


• Judge rules against Bayesian probability
  (tags: statistics law uk)


• Why This Year's Doctor Who Finale Was (Mostly) Better than Last Year's
  (tags:)


• The Pinboard people talk about the fallout from how badly Delicious fucked up.
  (tags: avos bookmarking fanfiction del.icio.us pinboard taxonomy)


• Cameron wants to scrap the Human Rights Act but Clegg won't let him
  (tags: libdem Conservatives politics rights uk)


• Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What's Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions
  (tags: TheOnion satire funny history)


• USA now assassinating its own citizens without due process
  (tags: usa law assassination murder)


• How cat videos get onto the internet
  (tags: cats videos youtube funny comic)

Comments

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

What you do with or to a proof is more open to debate I think.
But a theorem was true all along, even before anyone knew about it.

[andrewducker]

Aren't theorem's mostly "proven"?

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Yes, but the method of the proof itself. Eg, there are tons of proofs of Pythagoras. Each has been invented, I would say. There's only one theorem, which has always been true.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Greg Egan wrote a nice short story based on the notion that that is not actually the case :)

[simont]

Two short stories! There's a sequel in a more recent collection.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Something strictly is only a conjecture until it's proven but this is not always adhered to. Fermat's last theorem was an interesting case because it remained "claimed proven" (but most mathematiciancs now doubt it ever was proven by Fermat) until very recently. Now it is proven. Should it really have been Fermat's last conjecture?

[andrewducker]

Fermat's last guess? Fermat's last blind stab in the dark? Fermat's last assumption? Fermat's last joke?

[steer.livejournal.com]

I am not sure a "formalist" would agree with "true all along" but instead that a particular theorem is (and always was) a consistent result of manipulation of strings of characters beginning with a set of axioms and rules of inference. However, it is a result of picking the axioms and inference rules. This sits comfortably with, for example, the fact that some statements in mathematics are only "true" for the type of mathematics you choose. For example Zermelo's theorem is "true" in ZF set theory with the axiom of choice but not true in ZF set theory without. In Euclidean geometry Pythagorus is true but not in elliptic geometry.

Given that the mathematician is free to choose the axioms and inference rules he or she works with, is "discovered" the correct word? I'm not wholly sure. Most people would feel uncomfortable saying that Charles Dickens "discovered" the sequence of letters, spaces and punctuation that made The Tale of Two Cities.