Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Ninety-One!

My Dad (and #1 blog reader) turned 91 years old yesterday. You'd think at this age he'd sit high up on a mountain top, espousing wisdom. He would, except there are no mountains in New Brunswick, plus it would be rather chilly sitting outdoors at the moment.

Dad does, however, sit high on a hill and he often quotes National Geographic to me. Sometimes he quotes Scientific American but he knows most of that is lost on me (as I am not inclined toward the sciences).

Math is more my subject. Take a look at the spin I put on my Dad's birthday card.

Ian, is math a science? Maybe you are a scientific genius? This card has changed my view on you. In fact, it's done a 180.

Is math a science? That's a tricky question. Let's do some scientific investigating (Wikipedia)....

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) was a German born mathematician, often being credited as one of the best (not much competition...hehe). Gauss referred to math as the 'Queen of Sciences'. I'm unsure what the King of Sciences was but I assume that it was Entomology, but I can't bee sure.

Just because Gauss called math the Queen of Sciences doesn't mean that math is a science. Gauss could have been a royal bullshitter as well as a mathematical genius.

"In the original Latin Regina Scientiarum, as well as in German Königin der Wissenschaften, the word corresponding to science means a "field of knowledge", and this was the original meaning of "science" in English, also; mathematics is in this sense a field of knowledge. The specialization restricting the meaning of "science" to natural science follows the rise of Baconian science, which contrasted "natural science" to scholasticism, the Aristotelean method of inquiring from first principles."

I didn't Aristotally understand a word of that, but I'm pretty sure that I saw the phrase 'bacon ian'. Mmmm...bacon.

You really are not a scientist, are you, Ian? You might, however, be a science project. If anyone ever studies the science of 'you are what you eat', then you'd be an interesting case. Oink, oink.

Guilty. I did have bacon on the weekend.

At this point there is no tidy way that I can wrap up today's blog. I can't think any connection between my Dad's 91st birthday yesterday, Carl Gauss, bacon and the question of 'is math a science'. I'll just have to cast you adrift in your own thoughts, blown gently off course by bacon scented winds of nothingness.




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