Related papers: Comprendre les math\'ematiques pour comprendre Pla…
In Plato's dialogues Republic and Laws, the most important disciplines for the best education of the rulers of the city are identified with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Those disciplines, however, are not intended for practical…
The problem of counting the number of waves arriving at the vertex of a polyhedron is motivated by physics. In the article it was solved for the case of Platonic solid using three nontrivial results from number theory. This growth turns out…
We undertake a detailed study of the $L^2$ discrepancy of rational and irrational 2-dimensional lattices either with or without symmetrization. We give a full characterization of lattices with optimal $L^2$ discrepancy in terms of the…
Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…
The article reconsiders the position of the foundations of mathematics after the discovery of HoTT. Discussion that this discovery has generated in the community of mathematicians, philosophers and computer scientists might indicate a new…
The notion of the magnitude of a metric space was introduced by Leinster in [8] and developed in [10], [9], [11] and [16], but the magnitudes of familiar sets in Euclidean space are only understood in relatively few cases. In this paper we…
Mathematics cannot anymore be assimilated to a linguistic game, where formal proofs are strongly differentiated with conjectural thinking, without building any category of knowledge to understand the passage (Wittgenstein's gist). Nowadays,…
Barry Mazur published an article some year ago, where he showed, among other things, that the result in the so-called mathematical passage of Plato s Theatetus and Euclid s proposition X.9 in the Elements are very different, while almost…
We examine Paul Halmos' comments on category theory, Dedekind cuts, devil worship, logic, and Robinson's infinitesimals. Halmos' scepticism about category theory derives from his philosophical position of naive set-theoretic realism. In the…
Measures of irrationality are a numerical way of quantifying how far a given variety is from being rational (or rationally connected, uniruled, etc.). In the last two decades, there has been renewed interest in the study of these…
Magnitude is a real-valued invariant of metric spaces, analogous to the Euler characteristic of topological spaces and the cardinality of sets. The definition of magnitude is a special case of a general categorical definition that clarifies…
There are only aleph-zero rational numbers, while there are 2 to the power aleph-zero real numbers. Hence the probability that a randomly chosen real number would be rational is 0. Yet proving rigorously that any specific, natural, real…
Plateau's problem is not a single conjecture or theorem, but rather an abstract framework, encompassing a number of different problems in several related areas of mathematics. In its most general form, Plateau's problem is to find an…
As rewards of reading two great papers of Hermite from 1873, we trace the historical origin of the integral Niven used in his well-known proof of the irrationality of $\pi$, uncover a rarely acknowledged simple proof by Hermite of the…
Math is widely considered as a powerful tool and its strong appeal depends on the high level of abstraction it allows in modelling a huge number of heterogeneous phenomena and problems, spanning from the static of buildings to the flight of…
My purpose is to examine some concepts of mathematical logic, which have been studied by Carlo Cellucci. Today the aim of classical mathematical logic is not to guarantee the certainty of mathematics, but I will argue that logic can help us…
Much of Mathematics, and therefore Physics as well, have been limited by four rather consequential restrictions. Two of them are ancient taboos, one is an ancient and no longer felt as such bondage, and the fourth is a surprising omission…
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…
Both metamathematics and physics are posited to emerge from samplings by observers of the unique ruliad structure that corresponds to the entangled limit of all possible computations. The possibility of higher-level mathematics accessible…
This paper revisits the notion of classical orthogonal polynomials from a broader functional-analytic point of view. It is intended neither as a survey of known results nor as a review of the literature, but rather as a conceptual…