Bill Wadge's Blog

Mathematicians discovered a new [whole] number. It’s between six and seven and is called “bleen”.

-George Carlin

When we’re talking about π, what are we talking about? What kind of object is it?

A number, your text book will tell you. Where is it? On the real line. Where is the real line and how long has it been around? It’s just there, and has been forever …

Your textbook may not answer these questions but philosophers have tried. Needless to say there is no consensus. They’ve come up with several answers, and in my humble opinion, all have something to offer, but all miss the mark.

I have an answer which you’ll be happy to hear I am going to share with you. Briefly, π and its friends live  in our collective imagination. To be corny, in our hearts and minds.

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I’ve been to Greece often enough that I’ve picked up a bit of (modern) Greek. Like anyone in  my situation, I’ve had fun spotting Greek words with Englishs cognates based on Greek roots, popping up with unusual meanings in unusual contexts. Here’s my story of a typical day in a Greek visit, using some of these words. (I also translate some Greek idioms, like “the Bill Wadge”). Based on a true story.

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Time for another break from research (at least the normal kind).

I seem to be always discovering fundamental Laws of the Universe, especially about teaching. I’d like to share some of them with you.  They are each called “Wadge’s Law” … by me. Maybe the name will catch on. Here they are.

Wadge’s Law (of traffic)

No matter how late you go through an orange light, the guy/gal behind you follows you through.

Nothing says fun like formal power series!

A formal power series is a (usually) infinite polynomial in x. For example

1 + x + x² + x³ + x⁴ + …

This is an expression, not a number. If we give a value to x, we may get a number, or the evaluation may run away (diverge) on us (if |x|≥1).

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Lucid is based on a simple temporal logic. The time model follows from formalizing iteration as it appears in imperative programs with, say, while or for loops.

In this model there is a first or initial time point, and every time point has a unique successor. Imperative iterations normally terminate, so we should have only finitely many time points. Lucid avoids the complications of finite time domains by making everything at least notionally infinite, so that the domain of time points is the natural numbers with the usual order.

In temporal logic logicians have studied a huge variety of time domains. What do they mean in terms of iteration and how do we write iterative programs over nonstandard time domains?

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In the last post we introduced eod (end-of-data), a special sentinel value used to mark the end of a finite Lucid stream. Streams in Lucid are all formally infinite (non terminating) but we can use eod to represent finite streams as infinite ones filled with eod past a certain point. For example  the finite stream of the first five  primes is

2, 3, 5, 7, 9, eod, eod, eod, …

The input and output conventions are adjusted to interpret eod as termination. If the above stream is the output, the implementation will ‘print’ the first five values and terminate normally. If a user inputs the first five values, then terminates the input stream, this is not treated as an error. Instead, the ‘missing’ values are evaluated to eod if requested.

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As I’ve already explained, Lucid can be understood as functional programming with an added time dimension. What about other dimensions? In particular, what about a space dimension?

The late Ed Ashcroft and I discovered this possibility when we tried to “add arrays” to Lucid. Initially, we intended Lucid to be a fairly conventional, general purpose language. So we considered various ‘features’ and tried to realize them in terms of expressions and equations.

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And He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples; and the disciples gave to the multitudes. So they all ate and were filled, and they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments that remained. – Matthew 14.

The logician Willard Quine defined a paradox as an “absurd” statement backed up by an argument.

The famous result of Banach and Tarski definitely counts as a paradox by this definition. They proved that it is possible to take a unit sphere (a ball with radius 1), divide it into five pieces, then by rotations and translations reassemble it into two unit spheres.

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The Liar Paradox is simple enough to explain – is the following statement true or false?

This statement is false.

If it’s true then it’s false, but if it’s false then it’s true  … nothing works.

In my not-so-humble opinion, most (maybe all) paradoxes are the last step in a proof by contradiction that some unstated assumption is false.

In this case, the assumption is that the above statement is meaningful – is either true or false. The assumption is false, the statement is meaningless. End of paradox.

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In the last post there was plenty about Gödel but not much about Grammar and Go-the-game. Time to pay my debt!

Basically I said that Gödel’s results proved that no fixed set of facts and rules can on their own form the basis of mathematical knowledge. I said that hard-earned experience is indispensable. That mathematics is ultimately an experimental science. (This is not the usual take on Gödel’s work.)

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