Quote Originally Posted by altagid
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?"
you'll have to forgive my ignorance, i'm only 16 after all. what i meant by a new "kind" of math is like geometry, algebra, calculus. that may not be how math works so feel free to correct me if that's the case. what i meant by "know" is that society will know it. we know the world is round, though some tribes in Pacific islands don't know that the world isn't all oceans and islands. you are, however, forgetting that even humans will evolve into another species, and that species into another, presumably smarter with each new one. if they inherit all of our knowledge, and their successors inherit everything from the races before them, there's no telling where it could lead. possibly to the calculation of infinity. they won't be the same genetically, but they will have built upon us directly, so they will be a continuation of us IMO. i've even formulated my own theory of infinity (which will probably be discredited in the future, but i was 14 and high, and it still sounds pretty cool): if we assume that there is a smallest possible unit of time and a smallest possible unit of length, the either the number of moments from the beginning to the end of time or the number of points in the universe is equal to the highest number possible. not infinity by definition but by practice. what would be really sweet is if these numbers were exactly the same.