MW: It’s been ages since John Baez and I discussed Enayat’s paper—not since October 2020! John has since moved on to fresh woods and pastures new. I’ve been reading novels. But I feel I owe it to our millions of readers to finish the tale, so here goes.
The Secret History of the Mongols
National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
Another post from the History Book Club.
Filed under History Book Club
Science and the Founding Fathers
Another post from the History Book Club. It seemed particularly appropriate for today (January 20th, Inauguration Day).
Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison,
by I. Bernard Cohen, W.W. Norton & Company, 1995.
Filed under History Book Club, Reviews
Cornflakes and Bonti Knives
Filed under History Book Club, Reviews
The −1 Dimensional Reduced Homology Group of the Empty Set
Hatcher’s Algebraic Topology unfortunately hadn’t been written when I studied the subject in grad school, but a few years ago I participated in a meetup that went through about half of it. I wrote up notes on things I puzzled over, or just observations I found helpful. Here they are. Besides the homology group mentioned in the title, some other tidbits: a figure to elucidate the calculation of the fundamental group of the complement of the Alexander Horned Sphere, and more details for the intuitive proof Hatcher sketches of Poincaré duality.
Filed under Topology
The Peloponnesian War
Filed under History Book Club, Reviews
Socrates, Bad Guy
The Death of Socrates, Jacques Louis David.
(From Wikimedia Commons)
Another post from the History Book Club. Continue reading
Filed under History Book Club, Reviews
Gracefully Insane
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Topics in Nonstandard Arithmetic 9: Tricks with Quantifiers
Every specialty has its tricks of the trade. They become second nature to practitioners, so they often don’t make it into the textbooks. Quantifiers rule in logic; here are some of the games we can play with them. I’ll start with tricks that apply in logic generally, then turn to those specific to Peano arithmetic.
Filed under Peano Arithmetic
The Second French Revolution
Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People
Another post from the History Book Club. Continue reading
Filed under History Book Club, Reviews
Diagonal Argument 