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Status Reports

Status: Mathematics (2010 - December)

(Text as at 24/01/2011 22:09:07)

*** THIS IS NOT THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS NOTE ***

Rationale for this Project

This is rather an eccentric activity, partly an attempt to exorcise some ancient demon – the rather bruising experience of reading mathematics at King’s College Cambridge back in the mid 1970’s. However, any modern educated person should be reasonably up to date with the mathematical sciences, and statistical and probability theory are essential tools for evaluating evidence. If only it wasn’t such a difficult subject. This project is diverging from Mathematics per se to the Philosophy of Mathematics and other related subjects. For instance, it features in Philosophy of Religion as an analogy or model of the sort of necessary existence that God is supposed to have.


Summary of Progress during October - December 2010

During the last quarter of 2010 I was working flat-out on an MA course at Heythrop, University of London, and so was too busy to do much on this project. I’ve decided not to continue with the MA, and have now retired from HSBC. So, I have the opportunity to move forward on this project.

Time spent during the reporting-period was 19 hours (19 hours YTD where, as always in these reports, the “year” is an academic year starting in October 2010). This was expended on reading:-

• "Azzouni (Jody) - Deflating Existential Consequence: Introduction" (1.25 hours)
• "Gillies (Donald) - Revolutions in Mathematics: Introduction" (1 hour)
• "Gowers (Timothy), Barrow-Green (June) & Leader (Imre), Eds. - The Princeton Companion to Mathematics" (0.5 hour)
• "Lakatos (Imre) - Proofs and Refutations - The Logic of Mathematical Discovery" (1.5 hours)
• "Maddy (Penelope) - Naturalism in Mathematics" (1 hour)
• "Maddy (Penelope) - Realism in Mathematics" (1 hour)
• "Penrose (Roger) - Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe" (0.5 hour)
• "Shapiro (Stewart) - Thinking about Mathematics: Preface" (1.5 hours)
• "Singh (Simon) - Fermat's Last Theorem" (9.75 hours) – complete.