HPS391H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Cantor Set, Vincent Van Gogh, Algebraic Number
29 Apr 2016
School
Course
Professor
Document Summary
While no single mathematician dominated the scholarly landscape of the 1800s, the general theme for the century was abstraction and analysis of the theories established prior. It also delved away from the traditional limitations of the physical world, as seen in the emergence of non-euclidean geometry. Euclidean geometry was shown to be logically sound by eugenio beltrami, and it was a field more mathematicians were beginning to feel was worth pursuing. This freedom to study a system that might not be comparable to the real world was likened to the rise of non-impressionist artists like paul. Like the critics of modern art, however, there are those who say freedom from reality has reduced modern mathematics to a point of abstraction completely disconnected from reality, and so utterly useless. A response to his criticism is often that seemingly abstract formulae can actually turn out to have surprising real-world applications.
