Re: Eagle in the Snow, by Wallace Breem

ok.president@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Marko Amnell wrote:
>
> "Here is my favourite quote from Mandelbrot's book _Fractals and
> Chaos_. It's from 1891 by Edouard Lucas, who is comparing
> mathematics and chemistry in a funny way. "
>
> Marko,
>
> Since you're interested in complexity theory, fractals, etc, I am
> wondering if you're familiar with the work of Walter Fontana. He's a
> chemist at the Santa Fe Institute who is building a conception of
> chemistry based on the lambda-calculus, and he has tried to establish
> relationships between autocatalytic sets (which seem to have been very
> fundamental to the origin of life on earth) and the mathematics of the
> lambda-calculus (on which, as you know, Lisp -- the programming
> language that rabber John McCarthy invented -- is based).
>
> -Sayan.

Yes, I have heard to Fontana, but No I'm not at all familiar with the
details of his work. His attempt to connect chemistry and math is
much more concrete than that of Edouard Lucas, who was really
just elaborating a fanciful conceit in that quote (square, cubic
numbers etc being somehow similar to the study of crystals and
so on). And in fact, I'm not primarily interested in complexity theory
and fractals at all. I took one course at the Computer Science
Department of my local University and it happened to be on the
theory of computation (using the now classic COMPUTERS AND
INTRACTIBILITY by Garey & Johnson as the textbook). This was
mainly to get some understanding of the P vs NP problem. My
interest in math started out with mathematical physics (already
in high school and the first few years of university), moved on to
logic and set theory (and I came across the lambda calculus at
that time) for a few years, and is now focused on number theory
and geometry. I do try to read widely in the subject, however
(maybe too widely?) as I think a wide mathematical culture is
a good thing. Recently e.g. I've been struggling to understand
things like REPRESENTATIONS OF FINITE-DIMENSIONAL
ALGEBRAS by Peter Gabriel and Andrei Roiter (two pioneers in
this field) because I think it's a fascinating subject (and makes
use of highly elaborate systems of diagrams in proofs) but I'm
having trouble because of my limited understanding of
algebraic geometry.

P.S. I wonder if the first name "Sayan" signed above indicates that
the great Sayan Bhattacharya has returned to RAB?

.

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