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Mathematics

At Mind Matters News: Nobelist Roger Penrose talks about his impossible triangle

Penrose attempts a minimalist position when defending the reality of both mathematics and the mind in a world where many believe that only the physical exists. Read More ›

Appreciating Design and Designer – Vern Poythress

Cunningham: Rev. Dr. Vern Poythress (PhD, Harvard; DTh, Stellenbosch) is distinguished professor of New Testament, biblical interpretation, and systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. His books include Redeeming Science, Redeeming Mathematics, and Redeeming Philosophy, or Chance and the Sovereignty of God. Read More ›

Distribution of tossed coins, a reminder

We see the binomial distribution of coin-flipping possibilities, here based on 10,000 actual tosses iterated 100,000 times, also indicating just how tight the peak is, mostly being between 4,850 and 5,150 H: Thus we see the roots of discussions on fluctuations: Note, not coincidentally, sqrt (10^4) = 10^2, or 100. (Compare the bulk of the 10,000 coin toss plot on 100 k repetitions, centred on 5000h, with +/- 100 capturing the main part. Obviously possibilities run from 0 H to 10,000 H but there is a sharply peaked clustering about the “average”.) END

Robert J. Marks: Some infinities are bigger than others but there’s no biggest one

In Marks’s view, infinity is a beautiful — and provable — theory in math that can’t exist in reality without ludicrous consequences. (Thus the immaterial human mind is capable of creating things that don’t exist in material reality.) Read More ›

Robert J. Marks: 4. How Almost All Numbers Can Encode the Library of Congress

Re math: Almost every number between zero and one, randomly chosen by coin flipping, will at some point contain the binary encoding of the Library of Congress. That’s why infinity is a concept in math but not in the real world. Note: You should ask, how do we come to have concepts that are not part of the real world? Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: 2. Infinity illustrates that the universe has a beginning

The absurdities that an infinite past time would create, while not a definitive mathematical proof, are solid evidence that our universe had a beginning. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Claim: Honeybees, “like humans” can tell odd vs. even numbers

Bees are not six-legged humans. They are incorporating the mathematical structure of the universe into their survival strategies. The researchers mainly demonstrated that we can use operant conditioning on bees. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Unexplained — maybe unexplainable — numbers control the universe

Nobelist Wolfgang Pauli (1945) is said to have remarked, “When I die, my first question to the devil will be: What is the meaning of the fine structure constant?” At any rate, he thought about it a great deal during his life. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Single neurons perform complex math — even in fruit flies

The fly’s specialized neurons either multiply or divide incoming signals in order to pinpoint the location of a sound or the direction of movement. How likely is this to happen without any intelligence behind nature at all? Read More ›