There’s a pretty thought experiment that’s sometimes attributed to Democritus though it’s actually due to a later popularizer of the atomic hypothesis1 and it goes like this: Suppose we use the wor…| mathenchant.wordpress.com
dedicated to Norman Skliar and Sidney Cahn In an earlier blog-essay, When 1+1 Equals 0, I explained how 1 + 1 = 0 makes sense in mod 2 arithmetic; today I’ll tell you how the equation 1 + 1 = 1 mak…| mathenchant.wordpress.com
No reckoning allowed save the marvelous arithmetics of distance (from Smelling the Wind by Audre Lorde) Suppose a child comes up to you and says “I know 1 is odd and 2 is even, but I think 4 is mor…| mathenchant.wordpress.com
How far would you go to save a theorem? Would you invent a new kind of number? That’s what the mid-19th century German mathematician Ernst Eduard Kummer did, and while he was partly driven by the h…| mathenchant.wordpress.com
