Download or read book The Art of Conjecture written by Clyde Lee Miller and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2021-03-12 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Learned ignorance,” the recognition that God is beyond us and our knowing capacities is the theological concept for which Nicholas of Cusa is most famous. Despite God’s apparent absence Nicholas offers original ways to think about God that would unite his presence with his absence. He called these proposals “conjectures” (coniecturae). Conjecture and conjecturing are central to the methodology of Nicholas’s philosophical theology and to his thinking about human knowledge. By using concrete examples from the everyday life of his times as symbolic imagery Nicholas makes what we say about God imaginatively available and theoretically plausible. He called such conjectural symbols “aenigmata” (= “symbolic or ‘enigmatic’ conjectures”) because they partially clarify and likewise point to an exact truth that is beyond us. Novel and imaginative, Nicholas’s conjectural examples break with the traditional medieval Aristotelian examples and provide further evidence of his role as a figure bridging medieval and Renaissance thought. Following his earlier book, Reading Cusanus (The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), Clyde Lee Miller here examines and comments on the meaning of “conjecture” in Nicholas of Cusa. The Art of Conjecture: Nicholas of Cusa on Knowledge explores what Nicholas meant by conjecture and its import as demonstrated in his treatises and sermons. Beginning with Nicholas’ On Conjectures, Miller analyzes a series of conjectural symbols and proposals across Nicholas’s less frequently discussed texts and recently published sermons. This early Renaissance thinker offers an original and ground-breaking way of framing speculation in philosophical theology and more generally in philosophy itself.
Download or read book The Science of Conjecture written by James Franklin and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 767 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did we make reliable predictions before Pascal and Fermat's discovery of the mathematics of probability in 1654? What methods in law, science, commerce, philosophy, and logic helped us to get at the truth in cases where certainty was not attainable? In The Science of Conjecture, James Franklin examines how judges, witch inquisitors, and juries evaluated evidence; how scientists weighed reasons for and against scientific theories; and how merchants counted shipwrecks to determine insurance rates. The Science of Conjecture provides a history of rational methods of dealing with uncertainty and explores the coming to consciousness of the human understanding of risk.
Download or read book The Poincare Conjecture written by Donal O'Shea and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henri Poincaré was one of the greatest mathematicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He revolutionized the field of topology, which studies properties of geometric configurations that are unchanged by stretching or twisting. The Poincaré conjecture lies at the heart of modern geometry and topology, and even pertains to the possible shape of the universe. The conjecture states that there is only one shape possible for a finite universe in which every loop can be contracted to a single point. Poincaré's conjecture is one of the seven "millennium problems" that bring a one-million-dollar award for a solution. Grigory Perelman, a Russian mathematician, has offered a proof that is likely to win the Fields Medal, the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize, in August 2006. He also will almost certainly share a Clay Institute millennium award. In telling the vibrant story of The Poincaré Conjecture, Donal O'Shea makes accessible to general readers for the first time the meaning of the conjecture, and brings alive the field of mathematics and the achievements of generations of mathematicians whose work have led to Perelman's proof of this famous conjecture.
Download or read book What is Closer to the truth written by Theo A. F. Kuipers and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1987 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Uncle Petros and Goldbach s Conjecture written by Apostolos Doxiadis and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncle Petros is a family joke. An ageing recluse, he lives alone in a suburb of Athens, playing chess and tending to his garden. If you didn't know better, you'd surely think he was one of life's failures. But his young nephew suspects otherwise. For Uncle Petros, he discovers, was once a celebrated mathematician, brilliant and foolhardy enough to stake everything on solving a problem that had defied all attempts at proof for nearly three centuries - Goldbach's Conjecture. His quest brings him into contact with some of the century's greatest mathematicians, including the Indian prodigy Ramanujan and the young Alan Turing. But his struggle is lonely and single-minded, and by the end it has apparently destroyed his life. Until that is a final encounter with his nephew opens up to Petros, once more, the deep mysterious beauty of mathematics. Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture is an inspiring novel of intellectual adventure, proud genius, the exhilaration of pure mathematics - and the rivalry and antagonism which torment those who pursue impossible goals.
Download or read book Surveys in Combinatorics 1993 written by Keith Walker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains the invited papers presented at the 14th British Combinatorial Conference, held at the University of Keele in July 1993.
Download or read book Letters to Doubting Thomas written by C. Stephen Layman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When people encounter an argument for or against God's existence, it often raises more questions than it answers. In Letters to Doubting Thomas, C. Stephen Layman offers a fresh, insightful approach to the issue of God's existence--a way to organize what can seem like a blizzard of claims and concepts--bringing clarity to a debate often mired in confusion. Layman explores the evidence for the existence of God in a series of fictionalized letters between two characters--Zachary, a philosopher, and Thomas, an old college friend who appeals to Zach for help in sorting out his thoughts about God. As their correspondence grows, Zachary leads Thomas through an informal and highly readable comparison of Naturalism (the belief that there is no God and that ultimate reality is physical reality), and Theism (the idea that there is an almighty, perfectly good God). In engaging letters that break down complex philosophical arguments into easily digestible bits, the two friends delve into such weighty topics as the reliability of religious experience, various arguments for God's existence (such as the cosmological, design, and moral arguments), the question of free will, and the problem of evil. A piece at a time, they build an argument that shows that Theism, on balance, provides a better explanation of the world and human life than does Naturalism. Here then is a highly accessible account of the major arguments for and against the existence of God, capturing some of the best new insights of modern philosophy in a marvelously clear and engaging format.
Download or read book Problem Posing written by Stephen I. Brown and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a result of the editors' collaborative teaching at Harvard in the late 1960s, they produced a ground-breaking work -- The Art Of Problem Posing -- which related problem posing strategies to the already popular activity of problem solving. It took the concept of problem posing and created strategies for engaging in that activity as a central theme in mathematics education. Based in part upon that work and also upon a number of articles by its authors, other members of the mathematics education community began to apply and expand upon their ideas. This collection of thirty readings is a testimony to the power of the ideas that originally appeared. In addition to reproducing relevant materials, the editors of this book of readings have included a considerable amount of interpretive text which places the articles in the context of problem solving. While the preponderance of essays focus upon mathematics and mathematics education, some of them point to the relevance of problem posing to other fields such as biology or psychology. In the interpretive text that accompanies each chapter, they indicate how ideas expressed for one audience may be revisited or transformed in order to ready them for a variety of audiences.
Download or read book Speaking the Truth about Oneself written by Michel Foucault and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Speaking the Truth about Oneself is composed of lectures that acclaimed French philosopher Michel Foucault delivered in 1982 at the University of Toronto. As is characteristic of his later work, he is concerned here with the care and cultivation of the self, which becomes the central theme of the second and third volumes of his famous History of Sexuality, published in French in 1984, the month of his death, and which are explored here in a striking and typically illuminating fashion. Throughout his career, Foucault had always been interested in the question of how constellations of knowledge and power produce and constitute subjects. But in the last phase of his life, he became especially interested not only in how subjects are constituted by outside forces but in how they constitute themselves. In this lecture series and accompanying seminar, we find Foucault focused on antiquity, starting with classical Greece, the early Roman dynasties, and concluding with fourth- and fifth-century Christian monasticism. Foucault's claim is that, in these periods, we see the development of a new kind of act-"speaking the truth" (about oneself)-as the locus of a new form of subjectivity, which he deemed important not just for historical reasons but also as something modernity could harness anew or adapt to its own purposes"--
Download or read book Provability and Truth written by Torkel Franzén and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mathematical Argumentation in Middle School The What Why and How written by Jennifer Knudsen and published by Corwin Press. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get them talking: Your formula for bringing math concepts to life! Want your middle schoolers to intelligently engage with mathematical ideas? Look no further. This research-based gem brings tough Standards for Mathematical Practice 3 standards for mathematical argumentation and critical reasoning alive—all within a thoroughly explained four-part model that covers generating cases, conjecturing, justifying, and concluding. Immediately engage students in fun, classroom-ready argumentation activities Help students explore—and take ownership of—mathematical ideas and concepts Promote precise use of mathematical language Includes games, vignettes, a rich companion website, sample tasks, and links to online tools. Bring well-planned, well-constructed mathematical discourse to life in your classroom today!
Download or read book Cartesian Truth written by Thomas C. Vinci and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-04-23 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bold and pioneering, this book makes a detailed historical and systematic case that Descartes's theory of knowledge is an elegant and powerful combination of a priori, naturalistic, and dialectical elements meriting serious consideration by both contemporary analytic philosophers and postmodern thinkers. In the course of making this case Thomas Vinci develops a broad reinterpretation of Cartesian thought that unlocks novel solutions to many of the most vexed questions in Cartesian scholarship.
Download or read book Bangs Crunches Whimpers and Shrieks written by John Earman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-11-02 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost from its inception, Einstein's general theory of relativity was known to sanction spacetime models harboring singularities. Until the 1960s, however, spacetime singularities were thought to be artifacts of the idealizations of the models. This attitude evaporated in the face of a series of theorems, due largely to Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, which showed that Einstein's general theory implies that singularities can be expected to occur in a wide variety of conditions in both gravitational collapse and in cosmology. In the light of these results some physicists adopted the attitude that, since spacetime singularities are intolerable, general relativity contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Others hoped that peaceful coexistence with singularities could be achieved by proving a form of Roger Penrose's cosmic censorship hypothesis, which would place singularities safely inside black holes. Whatever the attitude one adopts toward spacetime singularities, it is evident that they raise a number of foundational problems for physics and have profound implications for the philosophy of space and time. However, philosophers of science have been slow to awaken to the significance of these developments. Indeed, this is the first serious book-length study of the subject by a philosopher of science. It features an overview of the literature on singularities, as well as an analytic commentary on their significance to a number of scientific and philosophical issues.
Download or read book The text of the Homeric hymns written by Thomas William Allen and published by . This book was released on 1895 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book International Journal of Mathematical Combinatorics Volume 2 2009 written by Linfan Mao and published by Infinite Study. This book was released on with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Topics in detail to be covered are: Smarandache multi-spaces with applications to other sciences, such as those of algebraic multi-systems, multi-metric spaces; Smarandache geometries; Differential Geometry; Geometry on manifolds; Topological graphs; Algebraic graphs; Random graphs; Combinatorial maps; Graph and map enumeration; Combinatorial designs; Combinatorial enumeration; Other applications of Smarandache multi-space and combinatorics.
Download or read book Symposium On The Foundations Of Modern Physics 1987 The Copenhagen Interpretation 60 Years After The Como Lecture written by Pekka Lahti and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 1988-02-01 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Treatise on Astronomy Theoretical and Practical written by Robert Woodhouse and published by . This book was released on 1821 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
