Tuesday, February 2, 2010

The Babylonian Theorem



My roommate subscribes to the Scientific American book club and I found this formula in a book review called the Babylonian Theorem. From what I can tell of such little information in a review this is how it was done before our use of quadratic methods and the author also speculates that the advantage of the Greeks was their ability to label geometric figures with letters which the other cultures could not yet do.

This is an impressive speculation but I feel that the explanation goes deeper in that we have to consider the nature of the letters themselves- their vowel representation in particular as well as our intuitive pictures in the game that was very popular with the Greeks proof and all in the first screen of figures drawn in the sand at the beginning of the alphanumeric age across the world.

My dream last night was rather strait forward, life is full of surprises for example the leaving or entering into this world and we try to make of it serious ritual. This is one of my trying to understand the world and people dreams but most likely is telling me something about physics or using the concepts creatively. It seem that once close or far apart in the Achilles and the Tortoise sense that distance is invariant and yet it is relative which is to say as if a rope incense or some length of tail each of us is initially given this constant that occurs with differentiation is in a sense dimensionless- that is the philosopher and country girl can make a bond that seems to endure and is no surprise for our sense of what is reality of love.

Now in my previous posts of the southern flag proportion problem we note the fact that the golden section times its inverse is negative one which is to say it is the removal of some area. As the addition of multiples of the section is one we put the golden digital ratios in the reverse order to find 13 x 17 which intuitively is to say we have the comparison of powers of the golden section (in three space there should be some interesting shadows of heights of the polyhedra).

This foundational way of looking at things I do in the hope that there may have been something missed in the way we address what are mathematics and numbers.

Which brings me back in general to the Pythagorean and even Fermat's theorems or say the square section of the cuboctahedron as a quarter tetrahedron that fills n-space non-Euclidean. In other words what is a continuous and what a discrete problem. In any case we have to think again about the transcendental spaces and what we can do more to define than what is a connected region in this dimensional space.

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I would like to add that I think the Hoarfrost and Rime poetry series is finished and I really need a new theme. This is in a sense in midwinter one of my less hopeful and creative periods as always a calm before a storm. I continue to occupy myself in higher aspirations so that I do not become angry at those morons who have retarded our progress and survival in this world.

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