Okay, Maybe Proofs Aren't Dying After AllIt appears that a famous mathematician led him astray:
Two experts argue that proofs are doing fine, contrary to a controversial 1993 prediction of their impending demise
But influential figures were behind the changes. One was William Thurston, who in 1982 won a Fields Medal — the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize — for delineating links between topology and geometry.The Fields Medal is not really the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize. The Abel Prize is much closer.
Thurston, who served as a major source for my article, advocated a more free-form, “intuitive” style of mathematical research, communication and education, with less emphasis on conventional proofs. He sought to convey mathematical concepts with computer-generated models, including a video that he called “Not Knot.”
“That mathematics reduces in principle to formal proofs is a shaky idea” peculiar to the 20th century, Thurston told me. Ironically, he pointed out, Bertrand Russell and Kurt Godel demonstrated early in the century that mathematics is riddled with logical contradictions. “Set theory is based on polite lies, things we agree on even though we know they're not true,” Thurston said. “In some ways, the foundation of mathematics has an air of unreality.”
No one showed that mathematics is riddled with logical contradictions. Thurston was not knowledgeable about the foundations of math. He was a brilliant mathematician, and he was good at explaining his work to others, but he was lousy at writing up his proofs. Some of his best work was written up by others.
Thurston's ideas were not accepted until proofs were written and published. Probably his biggest idea was that all three-dimensional manifolds could be decomposed into one carrying one of about eight geometric structures. This was always called a conjecture, until Perelman published what appeared to be a proof, and others filled in the gaps so that everyone was convinced that it really was a proof.
Russell showed that certain set theory operations led to contradictions, and then showed how an axiomatic approach could resolve them. Goedel gave much better axiomatizations of set theory, can examples of undecidable statements. An undecidable is the opposite of a contradiction.
Horgan's concession is based on quoting two bloggers. It would have been better if he had asked someone who was trained in mathematical foundations, instead of computer science and particle physics.
BTW, Scott Aaronson comments:
More importantly, I’ve been completely open here about my unfortunate psychological tic of being obsessed with the people who hate me, and why they hate me, and what I could do to make them hate me less. And I’ve been working to overcome that obsession.I seem to be one of his enemies, but I do not hate him. I don't disagree with his comments about proof, but he is not a mathematician and he does not speak for mathematicians.
"trained in mathematical foundations"
ReplyDeleteLOL Now that's a bullshit job. Proofs are dying because nobody cares what they are proving and computers can brute force huge ranges of validity. What exactly have we gained from, say, the classification of finite simple groups? And we wonder why self-driving cars can't even take left turns...
"Perhaps the most spectacular source of errors or holes comes in proofs that are so long and complex that only a few people in the world understand them. A famous example is something called the classification of finite simple groups: a triumph of twentieth-century mathematics which, as the name suggests, involves classifying each of an infinite number of mathematical objects into families. The first version of the proof that the classification was correct and complete was announced in 1983 and ran to over 10,000 pages, spread across 500 journal articles, by over 100 different authors. There turned out to be a problem with this first proof, which took nine years and another paper of over 1,000 pages to fix." https://plus.maths.org/content/pure-maths-crisis
Get a copy of Maple and you can shoot down math journals all day. Math is degenerating into abstract art. The axiomatic approach resolves nothing. It's a sideshow because it reintroduces initial value chaos by its initial conditions. It's totally false that in abstract mathematics, axioms can be obvious. Total bullshit.