Journeyman Philosopher: Mathematics and the real world

Journeyman Philosopher: Mathematics and the real world

My new year resolutions

My new year resolutions:
1. Learn a new Spanish phrase/day
2. A little exercise/day
3. Write an article/month

I am having a renewed and intense interest in mathematics

Just finished reading "Prime Obsession" by John Derbyshire - incredible read about prime number distribution and the story of Bernhard Riemann. Riemann is monumental to mathematics and without him, Einstein doesn't get to relativity.

I started this after reading Doug Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop" which gets into Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem - which uses prime numbers and powers thereof to prove that any arithmetic system has in it some unprovable statments. Gets very recursive.

I also just finished "A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness" by V. S. Ramachandran - an easy and interesting read.

Abou Ben Adhem

A poem I particularly like from childhood days.

Abou Ben Adhem

by James Henry Leigh Hunt

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight of his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
'What writest thou?'
The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered 'The names of those who love the Lord.
''And is mine one?' said Abou. 'Nay, not so,'
Replied the angel.

Abou spoke more low,But cheerly still;
and said 'I pray thee then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.
'The angel wrote, and vanished.
The next night It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names who love of God had blessed,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

Some questions I think and read about, when I am not working

1) How did the first self-replicating organic structure come into being, i.e. how did the evolutionary process of genetic variation / natural selection get started?

a) Background and references - Charles Darwin in his "Origin of Species" ends with this elequent summary..

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

b) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/bigquestions.html?pg=3#life enumerates the possibilities including

- primordial soup sparked with electricity,

- God,

- extra planetary source,

- complexity theory

c) Richard Dawkins - "The Selfish Gene" - interesting speculations on self replication, but no answers

d) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life - good summary on the subject