Quote Originally Posted by Adolf Smittler
perhaps a new form of math will be invented to reveal this. we're long overdue for one.
Yes perhaps. Perhaps all sorts of things. Perhaps in 5 mins Jesus will appear on this forum and bitch slap all the atheists. (Remember Mr "fuck you guys I know what's right" ? )

But the current mathematics says its not possible. We know how to evaluate any digit of PI's dec seq. The problem is that there are an infinite number of digits and we can evaluate them all unless we have an infinite number of people doing it or we have infinite time. And if we do find a way to visit them all where would we store this knowledge - even in its most efficient encoding it would require and infinitely large storehouse. And suppose we could do that - does that mean we "know" the sequence as human beings - I did ask what you mean by "know". And when you are done with the digits of PI there still remains an uncountably infinite number of such sequences . Most of them have no name we just call them irrational numbers - (no these are not numbers that believe in Jesus - these are numbers that cant be written as the ratio of two integers)

I am not sure what you mean about being overdue for a new math? The 20th century was an explosion of mathematical ideas. Many call it the Golden Age of Mathematics - IMO thats premature , like you say there is more to come - but we surely havent been slacking. I can read all the mathematics upto the beginning of the 20th century. I can read most of what was written before ww2 - after that - well I walk into the math section of a university library and many of the math books are completely unintelligible to me. Even though math is my business.

So I ask again what does it mean when we say we "know something" does it mean one person knows it? A small community knows it? Everyone knows it?

We now know that Fermats Last "Theorem" (conjecture actually) is proved. This means I can use this result in my work and build other proof on it. But man I cant read the paper by Weil. Only a handful of people on the planet can. Starting from here I estimate about 5 years of hard study before I can think about reading that proof. That may be optimistic. I have a high opinion of myself. And frankly for much of the human race, its just plain impossible - they dont have the intellectual equipment - so what do they "know?"