Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Nature by numbers

(Source)

8 comments:

  1. I don't get it. What was the point of posting this video?

    In Him,
    CD

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  2. Coram Deo,

    I can't speak for Patrick, but if you're looking for a specific apologetic application, put this in the "nature is clearly designed by God" bin. The beauty of creation in mathematical orderliness is another reason to shore up our hope in the Gospel, and sometimes a presentation like this makes such truths more obvious.

    It was also a fine opportunity to worship God's ingenuity and creativity.

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  3. Nicely put. Thanks, Matt. :-)

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  4. Besides, sometimes you do things simply because you find them fun or interesting. Not because you're trying to establish some sort of a point. Well, unless the point is that it's fun or interesting.

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  5. m'kay...thanks for responding.

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  6. It's in the same vein as something like Ian Stewart's The Mathematics of Life or Keith Devlin's Mathematics: The Science of Patterns (which has some nice illustrations and photographs).

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  7. BTW, David Berlinski has a new math book available. See here for a brief review.

    Of course, my fave math books or resources (well more like encyclopedias!) are The Princeton Companion to Mathematics edited by Timothy Gowers and Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers by Jan Gullberg. The latter uses European mathematical conventions though (e.g. commas for decimals and decimals for commas).

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  8. Gowers won the prestigious Fields Medal. If I recall, Gullberg was a medical doctor who loved mathematics and turned his hobby into a book.

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