Do you believe in fate?

Well, I'm not actually a mathematician, but I remember the physicist Paul Davies saying something about how an equilateral triangle on a large oval shape would not strictly obey the principles of Pythagoras' Theorem, or something like that. Any mathematician, please feel free to correct me, or improve on my description.

Thanks Sancho. That must be the first time I've been coherent in my life! :) I never realised how hard it is to think of absolute truths (without resorting to maths) but it is, you always find some way around a lot of them.

I agree with Lara, in english please, and I take maths (by the way a2 + b2 = c2 is with right-angled not equilateral but I still don't understand AP)

Oops. Yes, I meant right angled triangle.

Heh heh heh, oops,

I should proof read my posts better. “Equilateral”-- I guess the math is in the English. If all sides of the triangle are equal, it’d be a real trick to get the sum of the squares of two sides to equal the square of the third.

“Ya know this kinda reminds me of time back in reform-school….”

A.P., sorry, thought you were just fooling around. I sat here trying to picture a “Quadrilateral Triangle” but I just kept coming up with a trapezoid. If I don’t know the difference between a right triangle and an equilateral triangle, what are the odds that I know anything about Euclidian Geometry? About the only two things I remember from college math is the Law of Partial Pressures “PIVNERT” that is PV=nRT and the Taylor Expansion Theorem. With Taylor you never really had to solve an integral equation, but you could get close enough just by taking it out a bunch of iterations.

So did I for a moment. But what's even worse, is I think I might have been serious for once. I might be talking complete nonsense. However, let me see if I can rescue some sensibility from all this:

The properties of right-angled triangles on planes may be different to the properties of right-angled triangles on shapes.

If you maintain a right angle, and have two sides that bend across a sphere, and the third side is a straight plane, then, I think, a2 + b2 may not equal c2. But of course, I may be completely wrong.

It could be I was thinking of angles and their properties. But my brain is too tired to go there!:)

Mathematicians do dance to a different beat don’t they?

Here’s an interesting tid-bit I stumbled across. Apparently Bertrand Russell’s brother had given him a copy of “Euclid’s Elements” when he was 11 years old. He became very interested in mathematics and it occupied him through an otherwise miserable childhood. At the age of 17 he was contemplating suicide but was so absorbed in mathematics that he decided to stay alive to find out more about it. Possibly the only person in the history of mankind saved from suicide by math – instead of the other way around.

That was paraphrased from a lecture series given by Dr. Robert Kane from U. of Texas.

The geometry you're thinking of may be elliptical or hyperbolic geometry.

When I started my BA in humanities I forgot how to do math.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Sancho
Mathematicians do dance to a different beat don’t they?

Here’s an interesting tid-bit I stumbled across. Apparently Bertrand Russell’s brother had given him a copy of “Euclid’s Elements” when he was 11 years old. He became very interested in mathematics and it occupied him through an otherwise miserable childhood. At the age of 17 he was contemplating suicide but was so absorbed in mathematics that he decided to stay alive to find out more about it. Possibly the only person in the history of mankind saved from suicide by math – instead of the other way around.

That was paraphrased from a lecture series given by Dr. Robert Kane from U. of Texas.

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Thanks, now when people say to me 'why ya doing maths A level to do law, you'll never use it' I can bring this up. Isn't it strange what small things can so alter a life or indeed lots of lives.

I think truth is all relative. Every part of it. What's true to you can be a lie for somebody else, because people can't think outside their own heads, their own worlds, if that makes any sense. Like, if I REALLY believed the moon was cheese, for me, that WOULD be an absolute truth. It's completely relative to the person.

But it wouldn't be an absolute truth, the moon would not therefore be cheese for you and something elese for everyone else. Absolute truths should be true regardless of what peole think.

Sir Arthur Eddington used to talk about how he found the life of a physicist a bit like the life a schizophrenic (I think he didn't know much about schizophrenics, but that is another matter).

He would walk into a room and see chairs and tables and walls etc. He would slip into that macro-reality view, where these things are solid and textured and colourful. And the next moment, he would know that they are mostly empty space, with atoms flying through, into and off of them. He would know that they had no real discernible boundaries in the quantum world, and that there is a possibility that everyting on the table might fall through it as if there was nothing there.

So what could possibly have been true for Arthur Eddington?

And what would we mean by 'true'?

Well, I was going to agree with Faye but decided to look up the 'true' defintion of true. Agreeing with fact;not false. AP you do have a knack of bringing up questions to make people think. I still agree with Faye that truth is relative, although Cassandra does provide valid disagreement as well. Which brings me to the question, who is to say that the facts are accurate? Yes, as far as the moon goes, it is a proven fact. My argument is that the facts presented mostly to society are that of the media, or a book which may only provide an authors opinion. So, as individuals, we must seek out the sources of so-called facts and make a choice pertinent to the truth.

And even supposedly proved facts have been wrong in the past. A lot of what we believe we believe out of trust in those who told us it.

I think we may have worked ourselves around to Rene Descartes. A man who at some point in his life realized that almost everything he had been taught was false. He became so skeptical and questioning that he even questioned his own existence.

Of course he finally decided that he did exist. Famously: “Cogito ergo sum” - “I think therefore I am”

Which reminds me of a bad joke, but I’ll spare you all.