Month: January 2023

Our laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics. But maths itself is only as dependable as the axioms it is built on, and we have to assume those axioms are true.

You might think that mathematics is the most trustworthy thing humans have ever come up with. It is the basis of scientific rigour and the bedrock of much of our other knowledge too. And you might be right. But be careful: maths isn’t all it seems. “The trustworthiness of mathematics is limited,” says Penelope Maddy, a philosopher of mathematics at the University of California, Irvine.

Maddy is no conspiracy theorist. All mathematicians know her statement to be true because their subject is built on “axioms” – and try as they might, they can never prove these axioms to be true.

An axiom is essentially an assumption based on observations of how things are. Scientists observe a phenomenon, formalise it and write down a law of nature. In a similar way, mathematicians use their observations to create an axiom. One example is the observation that there always seems to be a unique straight line that can be drawn between two points. Assume this to be universally true and you can build up the rules of Euclidean geometry. Another is that 1 + 2 is the same as 2 + 1, an assumption that allows us to do arithmetic. “The fact that maths is built on unprovable axioms is not that surprising,” says mathematician Vera Fischer at the University of Vienna in Austria.

These axioms might seem self-evident, but maths goes a lot further than arithmetic. Mathematicians aim to uncover things like the properties of numbers, the ways in which they are all related to one another and how they can be used to model the real world. These more complex tasks are still worked out through theorems and proofs built on axioms, but the relevant axioms might have to change. Lines between points have different properties on curved surfaces than flat ones, for example, which means the underlying axioms have to be different in different geometries. We always have to be careful that our axioms are reliable and reflect the world we are trying to model with our maths.

Set theory

The gold standard for mathematical reliability is set theory, which describes the properties of collections of things, including numbers themselves. Beginning in the early 1900s, mathematicians developed a set of underpinning axioms for set theory known as ZFC (for “Zermelo-Fraenkel”, from two of its initiators, Ernst Zermelo and Abraham Fraenkel, plus something called the “axiom of choice”).

ZFC is a powerful foundation. “If it could be guaranteed that ZFC is consistent, all uncertainty about mathematics could be dispelled,” says Maddy. But, brutally, that is impossible. “Alas, it soon became clear that the consistency of those axioms could be proved only by assuming even stronger axioms,” she says, “which obviously defeats the purpose.”

Maddy is untroubled by the limits: “Set theorists have been proving theorems from ZFC for 100 years with no hint of a contradiction.” It has been hugely productive, she says, allowing mathematicians to create no end of interesting results, and they have even been able to develop mathematically precise measures of just how much trust we can put in theories derived from ZFC.

In the end, then, mathematicians might be providing the bedrock on which much scientific knowledge is built, but they can’t offer cast-iron guarantees that it won’t ever shift or change. In general, they don’t worry about it: they shrug their shoulders and turn up to work like everybody else. “The aim of obtaining a perfect axiomatic system is exactly as feasible as the aim of obtaining a perfect understanding of our physical universe,” says Fischer.

At least mathematicians are fully aware of the futility of seeking perfection, thanks to the “incompleteness” theorems laid out by Kurt Gödel in the 1930s. These show that, in any domain of mathematics, a useful theory will generate statements about this domain that can’t be proved true or false. A limit to reliable knowledge is therefore inescapable. “This is a fact of life mathematicians have learned to live with,” says David Aspero at the University of East Anglia, UK.

All in all, maths is in pretty good shape despite this – and nobody is too bothered. “Go to any mathematics department and talk to anyone who’s not a logician, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, the axioms are just there’. That’s it. And that’s how it should be. It’s a very healthy approach,” says Fischer. In fact, the limits are in some ways what makes it fun, she says. “The possibility of development, of getting better, is exactly what makes mathematics an absolutely fascinating subject.”

HOW BIG IS INFINITY?

Infinity is infinitely big, right? Sadly, it isn’t that simple. We have long known that there are different sizes of infinity. In the 19th century, mathematician Georg Cantor showed that there are two types of infinity. The “natural numbers” (1, 2, 3 and so on forever) are a countable infinity. But between each natural number, there is a continuum of “real numbers” (such as 1.234567… with digits that go on forever). Real number infinities turn out not to be countable. And so, overall, Cantor concluded that there are two types of infinity, each of a different size.

In the everyday world, we never encounter anything infinite. We have to content ourselves with saying that the infinite “goes on forever” without truly grasping conceptually what that means. This matters, of course, because infinities crop up all the time in physics equations, most notably in those that describe the big bang and black holes. You might have expected mathematicians to have a better grasp of this concept, then – but it remains tricky.

This is especially true when you consider that Cantor suggested there might be another size of infinity nestled between the two he identified, an idea known as the continuum hypothesis. Traditionally, mathematicians thought that it would be impossible to decide whether this was true, but work on the foundations of mathematics has recently shown that there may be hope of finding out either way after all.

For more such insights, log into www.international-maths-challenge.com.

*Credit for article given to Michael Brooks*

Inspiring students to be exuberantly responsive is one of the most significant aspects of mathematics directions and a serious aspect of any curriculum. Successful teachers focus attentively on the less interested or weak students and the intelligent ones. Here are a few ways—based on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation—that can come into action to inspire primary and secondary school students in maths preparation.

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation

Extrinsic motivation includes advantages that occur outside the student’s dominance. These may incorporate lucrative token rewards for top performance, escape “punishment” for accomplishing good, compliments for good work, and so on.

Although, many students show intrinsic motivation in their preference to understand a session or logic (task-related), to surpass others (ego-related), or to influence others. The ultimate aim gets to the barrier between intrinsic and extrinsic.

Strategies for Increasing Student Motivation in Math

Call attention to a gap in students’ skills: Disclosing to students a difference in their understanding abilities maximizes their desire to learn more. For example, you may present a few usual exercises or tasks that imply familiar circumstances, followed by exercises that include unfamiliar situations on the same maths topic. The more fiercely you find the gap in understanding, the more fruitful the motivation.

Display continuous achievement: Closely connected to the preceding technique is having students cherish a logical order of concepts. This varies from the earlier process in that it relies on students’ aspirations to increase, not complete, their knowledge skills. One instance of a sequential achievement method is how quadrilaterals differ from one to another from the point of view of
their properties.

Give a challenge: When students are challenged rationally, they respond with enthusiasm and attentiveness. Proper care must be taken in opting for the challenge for students like International Maths Olympiad Challenge offers maths test opportunities to students who want to prepare for the maths Olympiad from around the world. The maths challenge must lead into the curriculum and be within reach of the student’s abilities and grades.

Point out the usefulness of a topic: Introduce a practical implementation of genuine interest to the class at the start of a topic. For instance, in high school geometry, a student could be asked to find the diameter of a plate where all the relevant detail they have is a plate section smaller than a semicircle. The activity selected should be organized and easiest to motivate the students.

Use entertaining mathematics: Recreational motivation includes games, quizzes, contests, or puzzles. In addition to being chosen for their specific motivational advantage, these activities must be appropriate and uncomplicated. Effective implementation of this process will let students complete the recreation. Moreover, the fun and excitement that these recreational references create should be handled carefully.

Conclusion

Mathematics teachers must acknowledge the fundamental motives already exist in their learners or students who prepare hard to compete in International Maths Challenge. The teacher can then use these methods of motivation to increase engagement and improve the success rate of the teaching process. Utilizing student motivations and abilities can lead to the development of artificial mathematical problems and situations.

Mathematics suggested that time travel is physically possible – and Kurt Gödel proved it. Mathematician Karl Sigmund explains how the polymath did it.

The following is an extract from our Lost in Space-Time newsletter. Each month, we hand over the keyboard to a physicist or mathematician to tell you about fascinating ideas from their corner of the universe. You can sign up for Lost in Space-Time for free here.

There may be no better way to get truly lost in space-time than to travel to the past and fiddle around with causality. Polymath Kurt Gödel suggested that you could, for instance, land near your younger self and “do something” to that person. If your action was drastic enough, like murder (or is it suicide?), then you could neither have embarked on your time trip, nor perpetrated the dark deed. But then no one would have stopped you from going back in time and so you can commit your crime after all. You are lost in a loop. It’s no longer where you are, but whether you are.

Gödel was the first to prove that, according to general relativity, this sort of time travel can be done. While logically impossible, the equations say it is physically possible. How can that actually be the case?

Widely hailed as “the greatest logician since Aristotle”, Gödel is mainly known for his mathematical and philosophical work. By age 25, while at the University of Vienna, he developed his notorious incompleteness theorems. These basically say that there is no finite set of assumptions that can underpin all of mathematics. This was quickly perceived as a turning point in the subject.

In 1934, Gödel, now 28, was among the first to be invited to the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. During the following years, he commuted between Princeton and Vienna.

After a traumatic journey around a war-torn globe, Gödel settled in Princeton for good in 1940. This is when his friendship with Albert Einstein developed. Their daily walks became legendary. Einstein quipped: “I come to my office just for the privilege to escort Gödel back home.”  The two strollers seemed eerily out of their time. The atomic bomb was built without Einstein, and the computer without Gödel.

When Einstein’s 70th birthday approached, Gödel was asked to contribute to the impending Festschrift a philosophical chapter on German philosopher Immanuel Kant and relativity – a well-grazed field. To his mother, he wrote: “I was asked to write a paper for a volume on the philosophical meaning of Einstein and his theory; of course, I could not very well refuse.”

Gödel began to reflect on Kant’s view that time was not, as Newton would have it, an absolute, objective part of the world, but an a priori form of intuition constraining our cognition. As Kant said: “What we represent ourselves as changes would, in beings with other forms of cognition, give rise to a perception in which… change would not occur at all.” Such “beings” would experience the world as timeless.

In his special relativity, Einstein had famously shown that different observers can have different notions of “now”. Hence, no absolute time. (“Newton, forgive me!” sighed Einstein.) However, this theory does not include gravitation. Add mass, and a kind of absolute time seems to sneak back! At least, it does so in the standard model of cosmology. There, the overall flow of matter works as a universal clock. Space-time is sliced in an infinity of layers, each representing a “now”, one succeeding another. Is this a necessary feature of general relativity? Gödel had found a mathematical kernel in a philosophical problem. That was his trademark.

At this stage, according to cosmologist Wolfgang Rindler, serendipity stepped in: Gödel stumbled across a letter to the journal Nature by physicist George Gamow, entitled “Rotating universe?”. It points out that apparently most objects in the sky spin like tops. Stars do it, planets do it, even spiral galaxies do it. They rotate. But why?

Gamow suggested that the whole universe rotates, and that this rotation trickles down, so to speak, to smaller and smaller structures: from universe to galaxies, from galaxies to stars, from stars to planets. The idea was ingenious, but extremely vague. No equations, no measurements. However, the paper ended with a friendly nudge for someone to start calculating.

With typical thoroughness, Gödel took up the gauntlet. He had always been a hard worker, who used an alarm clock not for waking up but for going to bed. He confided to his mother that his cosmology absorbed him so much that even when he tried to listen to the radio or to movies, he could do so “only with half an ear”. Eventually, Gödel discovered exact solutions of Einstein’s equations, which described a rotating universe.

However, while Gamow had imagined that the centre of rotation of our world is somewhere far away, beyond the reach of the strongest telescopes, Gödel’s universe rotates in every point. This does not solve Gamow’s quest for the cause of galactic rotations, but yields another, amazing result. In contrast to all then-known cosmological models, Gödel’s findings showed that there is no “now” that’s valid everywhere. This was exactly what he had set out to achieve: vindicate Kant (and Einstein) by showing that there is no absolute time.

“Talked a lot with Gödel,” wrote his friend Oskar Morgenstern, the economist who, together with John von Neumann, had founded game theory. He knew Gödel from former Viennese days and reported all their meetings in his diary. “His cosmological work makes good progress. Now one can travel into the past, or reach arbitrarily distant places in arbitrarily short time. This will cause a nice stir.” Time travel had been invented.

In Gödel’s universe, you don’t have to flip the arrow of time to go back to the past. Your time runs as usual. No need to shift entropy in return gear. You just step into a rocket and take off, to fly in a very wide curve (very wide!) at a very high speed (but less than the speed of light). The rocket’s trajectory weaves between light cones, never leaving them but exploiting the fact that in a rotating universe, they are not arrayed in parallel. The trip would consume an awful amount of energy.

Gödel just managed to meet the editorial timeline. On his 70th birthday, Einstein got Gödel’s manuscript for a present (and a sweater knitted by Kurt’s wife Adele). He thanked him for the gifts and confessed that the spectre of time travel had worried him for decades. Now the spectre had materialised. Einstein declared Gödel’s paper “one of the most important since my own”, and stated his hope that time travel could be excluded by some as yet unknown physical law. Soon after, Gödel received the first Albert Einstein award. It went with a modest amount of money which Gödel, as it turned out, could use well.

Next, according to philosopher Palle Yourgrau, “something extraordinary happened: nothing”.

For several decades, the mind-bending discovery of Gödel, far from causing “a nice stir”, got very little attention. When Harry Woolf, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, arranged the eulogies to be given at Gödel’s funeral in 1978, he listed the topics to be covered: set theory and logic, followed by relativity, which he noted was “not worth a talk”.

Only by and by did eminent cosmologists, such as Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne or John Barrow, convey an area of respectability to the field. Today, it is mainstream. With time, it transpired that, years before Gödel’s breakthrough, several other cosmological models had exhibited both rotation and the possibility of time travel. However, this aspect had never been noticed, not even by the engineers of these universes.

Many physicists are happy to leave the paradoxical aspects of time travel to philosophers. They invoke a “chronology protection law” that would step in to prevent the worst. It sounds like whistling in the dark but helps to overcome the problem of haunting your own present as a revenant from the future.

And does our universe rotate? Gödel was equivocal on that issue. Sometimes he claimed that his model only served as a thought experiment, to display the illusionary character of time, which cannot depend on accidental features of the place we happen to inhabit. Cosmologist Freeman Dyson, however, reported that Gödel, near the end of his life, had shown dismay when told that evidence for a rotating universe is lacking.

For more such insights, log into www.international-maths-challenge.com.

*Credit for article given to Karl Sigmund*