Sunday, April 2, 2017

Beyond the Boundary of Logic


For a beautiful Sunday reflection, the ending words from Eugenia Cheng in "Beyond Infinity":
"The most beautiful things to me are the things just beyond that boundary of logic. It's the things we can get quite a long way toward explaining, but then in the end they just elude us. I can get quite a long way toward explaining why a certain piece of music makes me cry, but after a certain point there's something my analysis can't explain. The same goes for why looking at the sea makes me so ecstatic. Or why love is so glorious. Or why infinity is so fascinating. There are things we can't even get close to explaining, in the realm far from the logical center of our universe of ideas. But for me all the beauty is right there on that boundary. As we move more and more things into the realm of logic, the sphere of logic grows, and so its surface grows. That interface between the inside and the outside grows, and so we actually have access to more and more beauty. That, for me, is what this is all about.
"In life and in mathematics there is often a trade-off between beauty and practicality, along with a contrast between dreams and reality, between the explicable and the inexplicable. Infinity is a beautiful dream, inside the beautiful dream that is mathematics."


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