Sunday, January 07, 2007

PLATO:Mathematician or Mystic ?

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.--BERTRAND RUSSELL, Study of Mathematics


One should not conclude that such a bloggery as this is not without a heartfelt devotion to learning. That I had made no great claims to what science should be. other then what a layman point of view in learning has become excited about. What may be a natural conclusion to one who has spent a long time in science. Do not think me so wanting to knock on your door to enforce the asking of education that may be sent my way was truly as a student waiting for some teacher to appear.

This did not mean I should not engage the world of science. Not become enamoured with it. Or, that seeing the teachers at their bloggeries, were "as if" that teacher did appear many times. This is what is good about it.

I did not care how young you were, or that I, "too old" to listen to what scientists knew, or were theoretically endowed with in certain model selections.

More from the Heart?


"Let no one destitute of geometry enter my doors."


You know that by the very namesake of Plato used here, that I am indeed interested how Plato thought and his eventual conclusions about what "ideas" mean. So, of course there is this learning that has to take place with mathematics.

If I may, and if I were allowed to fast forward any thought in this regard, it would be to say, that the evolution of the human being is much appreciated in what can transfer very quickly "between minds" while a dialogue takes place. Hence the title of this bloggery.

Science demands clarity, and being deficient in this transference of "pure thought" would be less then ideal speaking amongst those scientists without that mathematics. Yet, I do espouse that such intuitiveness can be gained from the simple experiment, by distilling information, from the "general concepts" which have been mention many times now by scientists.

So it is of interest to me that the roads to mathematical understanding through it's development would be quick to point out this immediate working in the "world of the abstract imaging" is to know that such methods are deduced by it's numbers and their greater meaning.

That such meaning can be assign to a "natural objector function" and still unbeknownst to the thinking and learning individual "a numerical pattern that lies underneath it. A "schematics" if you like, of what can become the form in reality.

No reader of Plato can fail to recognize the important role which mathematics plays in his writing, as would indeed be expected for an author about whom the ancient tradition maintains that he had hung over the entry to his school the words "Let No One Un-versed in Geometry Enter". Presumably it was the level of ability to work with abstract concepts that Plato was interested in primarily, but if the student really had never studied Greek geometric materials there would be many passages in the lectures which would be scarcely intelligible to him. Modern readers, versed in a much higher level of mathematical abstraction which our society can offer, have sometimes felt that Plato's famous "mathematical examples'" were illustrations rather than central to his arguments, and some of Plato's mathematical excursuses have remained obscure to the present time.


A Musical Interlude



Plato's Academy-Academy was a suburb of Athens, named after the hero Academos or Ecademos.

I can't help but say that I am indeed affected by the views of our universe. In a way that encompasses some very intriguing nodal points about our universe in the way that I see it.

While I may not have shown the distinct lines of the Platonic solids, it is within context of a balloon with dye around it, that it could be so expressive of the Chaldni plate, that I couldn't resist that "harmonics flavour" as to how one might see the patterns underneath reality. How some gaussian coordinates interpretation of the "uv" lines, that were distinctive of an image in abstract spaces.

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