Hi Victor, Thanks for the nice reply. I looked up Dyson's lemma, but couldn't immediately find anything at my level. This reminds me of my failure so far to incorporate Weil pairing into a fledgling version of Hamilton-Abel theory, sadly. But I did find a few more worthwhile citizen reads: https://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-biological-and-cultural-evol... https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200212p.pdf As for the Birds and Frogs hypothesis: it's an interesting binary classification system, but I'm afraid it falls short of capturing the reality. I would argue that science is an entire ecosystem, which desperately needs as many diverse observers as it can possibly sustain. There should be a class of insect scientists who are specially adapted to understand the flowers and the fields in a way that neither birds nor frogs would find natural, perhaps with polarization-vision. Of course there will be jokes about idiotic butterflies rushing into the paths of oncoming motor vehicles, and about dung beetles rolling around in the muck, but who is to say that these life stories don't matter? --Brad On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 3:52 PM Victor Miller <victorsmiller@gmail.com> wrote:
That's sad to hear of Dyson's passing. I had many occasions to chat with him (but never about anything serious) in the cafeteria of the Institute for Advanced Study (a great place to eat, by the way). Whenever I would give a talk about Diophantine approximations, I would always try to mention his work on that (Dyson's lemma -- which, even though the result was eventually bettered by Klaus Roth, was very useful in lot of proofs about irrationality measures). And ask Hugh Montgomery about his encounter with Dyson which set off the whole GUE (Gaussian Unitary Ensemble) connection with the Riemann Hypothesis.
On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 3:54 PM Brad Klee <bradklee@gmail.com> wrote:
The population size of Homo sapiens has gotten so large now, it is stating the obvious to say that, despite his fame, many people never had the opportunity to meet Freeman Dyson, to attend one of his talks or lectures, or to write letters with him. A smaller segment of the population, who only encountered his works in print or video-recorded talks, probably have a similar sadness and feeling of regret for a missed opportunity, say, to have a chat about the relative merits of hooliganism and the extinction rebellion. In this situation, we have to thank science for creating such detailed systems of classification that we can have a half-way valid, rational explanation for life stories that happen, and others that do not.
Personally, I can still be happy having never met Freeman Dyson, and thoroughly enjoyed studying his theory for the life of the mind. The essay "The Scientist as a Rebel" [1] has been a huge influence in my most recent years. From his book by the same title, I particularly liked "A modern Heretic", a short essay on the thinking of Thomas Gold. These works are somewhat relevant to my postings on [seqfan] and [math-fun], because I wholeheartedly bought into the idea that professional training is not a deciding factor for performance in mathematical competitions. Of course the same is true for contests in physics, and Freeman Dyson himself, is a great example and inspirational personage as to what a trained mathematician can hope to accomplish in a neighbouring discipline.
I also found interest in the video interview [2] at web of stories, enjoyed hearing the stories about Bethe, and think that Gosper has a funny story about the Ramanujan conference at UIUC. If anyone else has suggested reading or interesting stories to share, perhaps consider posting to the list or sending me a personal message. The fact that he is now deceased is no reason to stop studying his works, quite the opposite.
--Brad
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2974452?seq=1 [2] https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/95
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun