Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Life in the Faust Lane


The long-suffering spouse is a mathematician. He writes mathematical notes on any piece of paper that will hold still: junk mail, envelopes, actual paper, newspapers... anything. So, when I go on a cleaning binge, my strategy is to make a pile of anything with mathematical scribbling on it and put it on his desk. How do I know if this was scribbling to explain something (comparatively) easy to a student or the next great theorem for the ages?

But we've hit a new low.

I found these mathematical sentences scribbled on a piece of notebook paper. They were expressed symbolically, but I don't know how to represent the symbols. Imagine, if you will, an upside down A and a backwards E, among other things.

For every x, there exists a y such that it's NOT true that x likes y.
But, it's NOT true that there exists an x such that x doesn't like z.

Yes sirree, Bob. We have a mathematical expression of the well-known philosophical truth, "everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sarah Lee." Well now, I'm glad we have that settled. I'd better get off the phone now; I'm sure the Nobel Committee is trying to call. (Yes, I know there's no Nobel Prize in math, but with boundary breaking work like this....)

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