17h ago

what is the truth

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I really want to learn this stuff. Its looks so much like magic
- I wouldn't say it's magic. It's more like understanding how the forces that hold together our universe, and how we can harness these forces for our own gain.
  
  Arthur C Clarke would like a word.
  
  I have never heard of him before. I recognize my comment isn't unique, except in perhaps phrasing. Has Clarke said something within the same vein?
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
  The third law is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
  I merely meant that the beauty of mathematics and natural science was a form of magic.
  
  Yeah, with the people who keep misusing his quotes
  
  Go on?
  
  No, read more Clarke
  
  To us as a species just barely out of the African steppes and valleys, it registers as some sort of secular magic, is like being mesmerized by a kaleidoscope or being at the center of a room full of mirrors.
  To pull out extra dimensions from math, and be able to see how the tips of our new lines wave about. To zoom in on the Mandelbrot Set. To consider infinities nested within infinities. To see how Pi literally goes on forever. To notice how Pi seems to pop up nearly everywhere, including where it wasn't expected. To see prime numbers go in outward spirals and making intricate patterns that seem to comply with the golden ratio.
  This is all very poetic, too. Maybe the purest kind of art. Surely the most rigorously rational, coming up with utterly unexpected and surprising structures, beyond our ability to imagine just with our senses at play.
- Looks like graph theory.
  
  I wasn't sure if Feynman Diagrams.
  
  Although a second look I agree they don't look right for that. Guess I should have taken more graph theory modules.
- More like a game. Advance in math learning new game rules and mechanics, that let you explore more of the game space.
  
  It used to get recommended all over Stack Overflow, but I did really love reading Göedel Escher Bach. That book taught me to see math as a game or, equivalently, as purely exercises in shuffling symbols around, with intent.
  That shift in outlook really unlocked the fun in math for me. I learned about category theory through Haskell shortly after, and got into number systems and the surreal numbers and quaternions after that. There's so much neat math out there that the wall of calculus and linear alg really imposes right before all the good stuff.

25 comments