On Sat, Jul 09, 2011 at 02:26:19PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > >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, > > Well, carefull. It is unidversal in some sense, but is not Turing > universal.
Of course. This is David's idea (not mine), expounded in Beginning of Infinity, of various sorts of universality, leading up to the idea of a universal knowledge creator. I haven't got to that part of the book yet, but I've noticed a bit of controversy about it on the FOR list. > > >Similarly, Babbage and Lovelace came very close to the Turing > >universality concept, but again mysteriously shied away from > >it. > > Here I disagree. I have made research, and I am convinced that > babbage has been aware of the Turing universality, of, its notation > system to describe its machine. He said that this was his real big > discovery, but none understand it. Fair enough (as far as I am concerned). It is a historical matter, in which I have no stake. But David Deutsch does make this claim on BoI, and in particular refers to the "Lovelace objection". > > I think it would have taken some more centuries. They might have > discovered it in the 12 or 13th century. They would not have been > able to miss it, especially with the development of math and > calculus, which they would have developed much faster than Newton > and Leibniz. OK, that is just my current opinion. We can't change > history. Fair enough. BTW, in response to your follow-on message when you mention Hypatia, don't take the movie "Agora" as the gospel truth - certain matters were exaggerated to make it cinematically more interesting. My son discovered this when he wrote a play based on those events for a school assignment (for which he got top marks). Nevertheless, it must be true that the European dark ages set us back several centuries. > > Bruno > > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > > > -- > 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. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.
