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G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (1940) He [Russell] said once, after some contact with the Chinese language, that he was horrified to find that the language of Principia Mathematica was an Indo-European one. John Edensor Littlewood, Littlewood's Miscellany (1986) The Principia Mathematica (often abbreviated PM) is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics written by ...
As a theme and as a subject in the arts, the anti-intellectual slogan 2 + 2 = 5 pre-dates Orwell and has produced literature, such as Deux et deux font cinq (Two and Two Make Five), written in 1895 by Alphonse Allais, which is a collection of absurdist short stories; [1] and the 1920 imagist art manifesto 2 × 2 = 5 by the poet Vadim ...
In mathematics, certain kinds of mistaken proof are often exhibited, and sometimes collected, as illustrations of a concept called mathematical fallacy.There is a distinction between a simple mistake and a mathematical fallacy in a proof, in that a mistake in a proof leads to an invalid proof while in the best-known examples of mathematical fallacies there is some element of concealment or ...
The Basel problem is a problem in mathematical analysis with relevance to number theory, concerning an infinite sum of inverse squares. It was first posed by Pietro Mengoli in 1650 and solved by Leonhard Euler in 1734, [1] and read on 5 December 1735 in The Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. [2] Since the problem had withstood the attacks of ...
Goldbach's conjecture is used when studying computation complexity. [36] The connection is made through the Busy Beaver function, where BB (n) is the maximum number of steps taken by any n state Turing machine that halts. There is a 27 state Turing machine that halts if and only if Goldbach's conjecture is false.
Calculus. In mathematics, the harmonic series is the infinite series formed by summing all positive unit fractions: The first terms of the series sum to approximately , where is the natural logarithm and is the Euler–Mascheroni constant. Because the logarithm has arbitrarily large values, the harmonic series does not have a finite limit: it ...
Then P(n) is true for all natural numbers n. For example, we can prove by induction that all positive integers of the form 2n − 1 are odd. Let P(n) represent " 2n − 1 is odd": (i) For n = 1, 2n − 1 = 2 (1) − 1 = 1, and 1 is odd, since it leaves a remainder of 1 when divided by 2. Thus P(1) is true.
1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ⋯. First six summands drawn as portions of a square. The geometric series on the real line. In mathematics, the infinite series 1 2 + 1 4 + 1 8 + 1 16 + ··· is an elementary example of a geometric series that converges absolutely. The sum of the series is 1. In summation notation ...