I was wondering if there is a name for the practice of drawing tenuous assocations between unassociated entities from a rich association domain, and specifically, the practice of drawing mathematical associations between mathematically unrelated numbers?
Applied Statistics? Thane Plambeck 650 321 4884 office 650 323 4928 fax http://www.plambeck.org ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Wilson" <davidwwilson@comcast.net> To: "Math Fun" <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Monday, January 19, 2004 1:51 PM Subject: [math-fun] Tenuous Associations
I have in front of me an article "The Mystery of Time" from "The Mongol Messenger", a Mongolian newspaper out of Ulaan Bataar, dated January 2002. This article was sent to me by a friend in the country, who thought I might find it of mathematical interest. The content of the article is quite entertaining, though of little mathematical merit. The author is apparently from the UK.
I would consider the article a crackpot piece, though it appears to be well written and of a less confrontational tenor than many such articles I have read. It contains some interesting equations(sic). It is difficult to summarize the article, which seems to be a hodgepodge of mystical and mathematical associations revolving around the concept of time, but with no overriding premise or point. I have a mosaic scan of the article available upon request, about 6MB.
The author seems to be fixated on certain historical dates, 1543 (Copernicus's heliocentric theory), 1618 (Kepler's laws), 1687 (Newton's Principia), 2001 (unified physics?), and 2060 (Newton's Last Judgment date?). The Hindu cycle (4320000000 years?) also figures prominent. All sorts of wondrous mathematical associations are used to justify or explain the significance of these dates.
The types of things done in this article are common in crackpot literature, particularly the misuse of associations. Since mathematics is so rich in associations, and numbers are so pervasive in our affairs, its is only natural that unjustifiable mathematical associations between unrelated numbers would suggest themselves. And if you push it, you can find "significant" relationships between all sorts of unrelated numbers.
I was wondering if there is a name for the practice of drawing tenuous assocations between unassociated entities from a rich association domain, and specifically, the practice of drawing mathematical associations between mathematically unrelated numbers?
For instance, let us suppose I see special historical significance in the person of George Washington (which I do). I notice that his birth year, 1732 is reminiscent of sqrt(3) = 1.732+, and from that propose some sort of mystic significance. So let us drag down this mystic association.
First, we assume that George Washington's birth date is a significant determinant or indicator of his personal signficance, not an uncommon practice, certainly a major underpinning of astrology and other mystical arts. Then we assign his birth year the number 1732. This is a customary, but ultimately arbitrary number. It indicates that the Earth has orbited the sun somewhere between 1732 and 1733 times between the unknown and probably incorrect time of the birth of Jesus Christ and the time of birth of George Washington. 1732 has a visual similarity to the number 1.732, an approximation to the square root of 3. The visual similarity rests on the peculiarities of our decimal notation, which itself rests on the number 10, presumably the number of fingers on our two hands. The actual mathematical association is 1732 = floor(1000 * sqrt(3)).
I could take this exploration further, but suffice it to say that this obvious mystic significance I have assigned to George Washington is based on a not-so-simple mathematical relationship between several unrelated quantities, including the time of George Washington's birth, the time of Jesus Christ's birth, errors in the calculation of the latter date, the period of revolution of the Earth about the Sun, the number of fingers on the hands of human beings, and the arbitrary integers 3 and 1000. To which of these quantities does the relation 1732 = floor(1000 * sqrt(3)) lend significance? And certainly there are many other birth dates and events occuring in the year 1732 as we reckon it, which were not nearly so historically significant as the birth of George Washington, which leads us to question the force of the association.
Is there a name for the inappropriate use of tenuous associations such as the one described above? If not there should be. Because numbers are rife with mathematical associations, and are so pervasive in our everyday experience, they lend themselves to this sort of abuse, and there should be a specific term for this type of abuse of numerical associations.
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