Subject: Re: [HM] Mathematics and Time
From: Gordon Fisher (gfisher@shentel.net)
Date: Wed Mar 08 2000 - 11:35:51 EST
Off the top of my head (or somewhere close to that), I think of L E J Brouwer,
whose so-called intuitionism was based partly, as I recall, on time, if only
implicitly. Also William Hamilton, he of the quaternions, etc., wrote rather
copiously on time. In those days in which pure and applied mathematics
weren't as separated as they often are now, people were conscious of the
importance of time in mathematical formulations. I think in this connection
of Galileo, and his formulation of a law of falling bodies, a species of a law
of intertia, etc. It has now been many years since I dipped into Galileo's
works, but I seem to recall some material in which he wrote explicitly about
time, in a document I think is relatively unknown nowadays to historians who
consider this sort of thing (but I'm not sure about this). I expect that one
can interpret some of the work of Plato and Aristotle, and some of their
predecessors as being concerned with relationship of time to mathematics.
Plato and Aristotle, for example, were concerned, in their different ways, to
put it crudely, with distinctions between ideal or idealized mathematical
constructions, and how these are related to the sorts of things that happen in
the world. One might argue that it was in those "classical" Greek times that
separations between "pure" and "applied" mathematics began in our worlds of
mathematics and some of the rest of our worlds.
Gordon Fisher gfisher@shentel.net
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