Related papers: A Mathematical Approach to the Plato's Problem
Plato is well-known in mathematics for the eponymous foundational philosophy Platonism based on ideal objects. Plato's allegory of the cave provides a powerful visual illustration of the idea that we only have access to shadows or…
The inverse problem of Galois Theory was developed in the early 1800 s as an approach to understand polynomials and their roots. The inverse Galois problem states whether any finite group can be realized as a Galois group over Q (field of…
In this paper, we study the so-called 'Mathematical part' of Plato's Theaetetus. Its subject concerns the incommensurability of certain magnitudes, in modern terms the question of the rationality or irrationality of the square roots of…
The chapter advances a reformulation of the classical problem of the nature of mathematical objects (if any), here called "Plato's problem," in line with the program of a philosophy of mathematical practice. It then provides a sketch of a…
To account for the first proof of existence of an irrational magnitude, historians of science as well as commentators of Aristotle refer to the texts on the incommensurability of the diagonal in Prior Analytics, since they are the most…
This article is the first part of a study of the so-called 'mathematical part' of Plato's Theaetetus (147d-148b). The subject of this 'mathematical part' is the irrationality, one of the most important topics in early Greek mathematics. As…
We consider several appearances of the notion of convexity in Greek antiquity, more specifically in mathematics and optics, in the writings of Aristotle, and in art. The final version of this article will appear in the book `Geometry in…
Induction is a form of reasoning that starts with a particular example and generalizes to a rule, namely, a hypothesis. However, establishing the truth of a hypothesis is problematic due to the potential occurrence of conflicting events,…
The solution of Apollonius' problem on constructing a circle (line), tangent to three given circles (lines), is presented in terms of oriented circles and inversive invariants. Tangency is understood as the coincidence of tangent vectors at…
There are good reasons to believe that we are classical algorithms run on (effectively) classical machines. However, the fact that a physical state of a system in a universe described by a classical deterministic model doesn't contain any…
Karl Popper published, in 1968, a paper that allegedly found a flaw in a very influential article of Birkhoff and von Neumann, which pioneered the field of "quantum logic". Nevertheless, nobody rebutted Popper's criticism in print for…
Newton's problem of minimal resistance is one of the first problems of optimal control: it was proposed, and its solution given, by Isaac Newton in his masterful Principia Mathematica, in 1686. The problem consists of determining, in…
We show that mere observation of a quantum system can turn its dynamics from a very simple one into a universal quantum computation. This effect, which occurs if the system is regularly observed at short time intervals, can be rephrased as…
With his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein produced a revolution in our conception of reality and of the knowledge we can obtain from it. This revolution can be viewed from philosophy as leading to one of the great paradigms in…
The Bertrand's theorem can be formulated as the solution of an inverse problem for a classical unidimensional motion. We show that the solutions of these problems, if restricted to a given class, can be obtained by solving a numerical…
Mathematicians have long been fascinated by the resolution of algebraic and Diophantine equations in search of integer or rational solutions. This article presents a list of thirty-three open problems in number theory, posed in the 13th…
Quantum mechanics represents one of the greatest triumphs of human intellect and, undoubtedly, is the most successful physical theory we have to date. However, since its foundation about a century ago, it has been uninterruptedly the center…
In this paper I study the connection between logic and metaphysics in Plato's participation theory, from the structural properties of the latter. Although Plato was the first ever to formulate the contradiction principle explicitly (in the…
An inverse source problem for the heat equation is considered. Extraction formulae for information about the time and location when and where the unknown source of the equation firstly appeared are given from a single lateral boundary…
In different passages of his dialogues, Plato showed deep mathematically-based physical insights. Regrettably most readers overlooked the respective statements, or they utterly did not understand those hints since they were full of…