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posted by CoolHand on Saturday July 25 2015, @08:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the beautiful-mind dept.

The New York Times published an article in its magazine about one of the greatest mathematicians living today, Terry Tao. The first paragraph should whet one's appetite for the rest of the article:

This April, as undergraduates strolled along the street outside his modest office on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, the mathematician Terence Tao mused about the possibility that water could spontaneously explode. A widely used set of equations describes the behavior of fluids like water, but there seems to be nothing in those equations, he told me, that prevents a wayward eddy from suddenly turning in on itself, tightening into an angry gyre, until the density of the energy at its core becomes infinite: a catastrophic ‘‘singularity.’’ Someone tossing a penny into the fountain by the faculty center or skipping a stone at the Santa Monica beach could apparently set off a chain reaction that would take out Southern California.

There are some people who are just too smart, and this guy is one of them.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Sunday July 26 2015, @06:14PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 26 2015, @06:14PM (#213925) Journal

    While in a sense that is true, there is also nothing more false to reality than mathematics. Math is both the truest and falsest description of reality, because it's the most precise and consistent.

    This is why an earlier poster said that math was not a science. It's also why Einstein said:

    As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
    Sidelights on Relativity

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    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
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