Tag Archives: Alan Turing

Mathemagick & Mystiphysics: The Probabilities of Pandemonium

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Jour­ney with the Wan­der­ing Stars! Hypa­tia! Alan Tur­ing! Al-Khwarizmi! Maria Agnesi! Brah­magupta! Georg Can­tor! Evariste Galois! Seven math­e­mati­cians from var­i­ous parts of his­tory mys­te­ri­ously banded together to mag­i­cally take on prob­lems of a grand and meta­phys­i­cal nature. In these first three adven­tures, an abstract artist steals the van­ish­ing point from all of his­tory, the Invis­i­ble Hand is log­ging the Philoso­phers For­est with his Seven Deadly Sins and the Wan­der­ing Stars get caught up in the Great Flatland/Wonderland War!

Watch below the Pre­view Motion for the first part of the comic writ­ten by James Davidge and drawn by Jesse Davidge. Nar­ra­tion by James Davidge and Christa Mayer with guest cry­ing by Ella Davidge. Music by Shawn Can­ning (gui­tar) and Sarah Sand­ham (violin).


Dangerous Knowledge Part I

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The fol­low­ing doc­u­men­tary was orig­i­nally aired on BBC 4 on 8th August ‘07 as part of the “Sci­ence You Can’t See” sea­son. Dan­ger­ous Knowl­edge tells the story of four bril­liant minds that pushed the bound­aries of human knowl­edge to it’s lim­its but by doing that they paid a very high price (mad­ness or suicide).

The bril­liant math­e­mati­cian, Georg Can­tor, the physi­cist Lud­wig Boltz­mann, Kurt Gödel, the great­est logi­cian of all time and Alan Tur­ing, father of com­puter sci­ence. Each one of them reached the edge of the precipice and could not pull back.

Georg Can­tor, believed he was God’s mes­sen­ger.  But when his the­o­ries of infin­ity uncov­ered para­doxes and uncer­tainty at the foun­da­tion of math­e­mat­ics, he was bit­terly opposed and even­tu­ally dri­ven insane. Cantor’s one time friend Leopold Kro­necker said that he was a cor­rupter of youth. He died on Jan­u­ary 6, 1918 in the sana­to­rium where he had spent the final year of his life.

The physi­cist Lud­wig Boltz­mann, then brought uncer­tainty into the heart of Physics itself and faced equally implaca­ble oppo­si­tion.  After 30 years of being unable to get his the­o­ries accepted, he com­mit­ted suicide.

Watch the first part of the doc­u­men­tary now.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infin­ity in the palm of your hand,
And eter­nity in an hour.

William Blake

Watch the sec­ond part of the doc­u­men­tary in the fol­low­ing post.


Dangerous Knowledge Part II

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This sec­ond part of the doc­u­men­tary focuses on Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing.

Kurt Gödel wanted to solve the prob­lems that had defeated Can­tor and prove once and for all the com­plete­ness of math­e­mat­ics. Instead he proved math­e­mat­ics would always be incom­plete and some prob­lems would for­ever lie beyond log­i­cal proof. He starved him­self to death.

Finally, Alan Tur­ing who we have men­tioned in the past. He died still ask­ing if the lim­its of logic were the lim­its of the human mind or if we tran­scended mere logic.

Here is the sec­ond part of the video.

If you reached this post before watch­ing the first part of the doc­u­men­tary, you can go to the first part here.


This year marks the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth

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I can’t help using a pop­u­lar say­ing to start explain­ing how a feel about an arti­cle on BBC News regard­ing a call from Mem­ber of Par­la­ment Iain Stew­art to ‘par­don’ com­puter pio­neer Alan Tur­ing, so here it is: “L’enfer est plein de bonnes volon­tés et désirs”

Per­haps I am mis­in­ter­pret­ing the mean­ing of the word par­don here, so allow me to use some help from Merrian-Webster:

1: indul­gence
2: the excus­ing of an offense with­out exact­ing a penalty
3
a : a release from the legal penal­ties of an offense
b : an offi­cial war­rant of remis­sion of penalty
4: excuse or for­give­ness for a fault, offense, or discourtesy

I had also read an arti­cle not too long ago regard­ing an e-petition to grant Alan Tur­ing a for­mal par­don. This ini­tia­tives make me trem­ble with right­eous indig­na­tion. For­mer prime min­is­ter (Gor­don Brown) issued an offi­cial apol­ogy on behalf of the gov­ern­ment. So I don’t under­stand the need for a ‘Pardon’. That is one of the prob­lems with rep­re­sen­ta­tives and insti­tu­tions of ‘jus­tice’, they do not apol­o­gize, they grant ‘par­dons’, they were right all along, but they are so mag­nan­i­mous, they for­give our ‘sins’ but we bet­ter com­ply or else…

Tur­ing was arrested under the same law that was used to con­vict Oscar Wilde in 1895. He was con­victed of gross inde­cency fol­low­ing a rela­tion­ship with another man and under­went hor­monal treat­ment (chem­i­cal cas­tra­tion) as an alter­na­tive to prison. Here is an infor­ma­tive arti­cle with some more details about Tur­ing and the whole affair.

Ok,well, enough with the rant. The good news is that this year (23 June) marks the cen­te­nary of his birth and as the arti­cle states, it affords us a great oppor­tu­nity to put right what was done wrong to him. We are hear­ing suggestions.