On Fri, Jul 08, 2011 at 11:04:56PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 08 Jul 2011, at 03:39, B Soroud wrote: > > >I mean if you went back to classical greece... or classical > >india.... could it have been predicted or shown to deduced? > > Excellent question. China was close. Reading the treatise "number" > by Plotinus, and having a bit study Diophantus, I am not sure that > in the world were Plato academia lasted longer they could have find > it. Nature found it before (quantum vaccum, DNA, Brain, humans, > Human thought, computers, ...). > It is the little God. The one you can named (Like FORTRAN, Java, > c++, LISP, game of life, etc.) but when you name it, its names > multiplies.
David Deutsch has an interesting discussion about this in his "Beginning of Infinity". He actually introduces several notions of universality, one of which is universality of the numbering system. Our numbering system is universal, since the discovery of the zero, but ancient Greek & Roman systems were not. Archimedes came close to a universal numbering system in the "Sand Reckoner", but mysteriously shied away from true universality (his system included some rather arbitrary restrictions preventing it from true universality). Similarly, Babbage and Lovelace came very close to the Turing universality concept, but again mysteriously shied away from it. Deutsch remarks that we as a species seem to have a reluctance to making systems universal, which is quite curious. So in answer to this question, even if Plato's academy had continued, it probably still would not have discovered Turing universality. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
