Math whiz chooses small religious school in Queens over Ivy League

[rug]

Mendel Friedman, of Lander college, topped New York in math contest

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1074549.1336505193!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/image.jpg

Mendel Friedman, 20, a student at the Lander College for Men in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, recently placed 22nd out of 4,400 contenders in the William Lowell Putnam competition, a prestigious national math contest. It was the highest ranking of any contestant from a New York college. (Anthony DelMundo for New York Daily News)

By Joe Parziale / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, May 9, 2012, 6:00 AM

Mendel Friedman’s academic prowess could have landed him at any Ivy League college of his choice.

But this “gifted prodigy” — as one of his teachers describes him — chose a small, religious school in Queens to hone both his academics and his faith.

After graduating high school with an immaculate report card and near-perfect SAT scores,

The 20-year-old chose the Lander College for Men in Kew Gardens Hills because of its promise for individual attention and focus on Judaic studies.

He recently finished among the top ranks in one of the most competitive undergraduate math contests in the nation.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/queens/math-whiz-chooses-small-religious-school-queens-ivy-league-article-1.1074550?localLinksEnabled=false

Good for him!

[intaglio]

1. And the vast majority of Newton's writings were either religious tracts or alchemical

Does that mean we should not mourn the loss to mathematics and physics which that mania entailed?

[rug]

2. You assume two things:

One, that he would have written more mathematics;

Two, that his exercises in religion and alchemy did not enhance his mathematical writing.

Either way, the post is about this student, not Newton.

I'm impressed both by him and his choices.

[dmallind]

3. Hey whatever's right for him is good

so long as he doesn't start trying to force his choices on the rest of us or claim special privileges denied to those who made other choices, it matters not one whit if he becomes a really religious mathematician or a Rabbi who is really good at math.

[AlbertCat]

4. The 20-year-old chose the Lander College for Men

Maybe he doesn't get along with girls.

Maybe he can't take the competition of an Ivy League school.


Who cares?

Hope he has fun!

[rug]

5. You should look up the school.

[AlbertCat]

6. You should look up the school.

Why? I don't care.

[rug]

7. Ah, I thought you'd want content in your post.

[AlbertCat]

8. Ah, I thought you'd want content in your post.

Only when discussing something of interest.

[kentauros]

9. This makes me think of the movie "Pi"

I wonder if he's seen it?

[rug]

10. That's a fine movie.

It also reminds me of "The Chosen".

I wonder if he'll stay with it.

[kentauros]

15. At first, the voice-over in that trailer

made it feel like a parody trailer, but I see it is a real movie

I hope he stays with the mathematics, too. I wonder where he'll end up working/researching...

[mr blur]

11. So he's a Math whizz and a Jew. And...?

[rug]

12. He's a particularly religious person and he's a particularly adept mathematician.

Would you say he's either irrational or deluded?

If not, why not?

[dmallind]

16. About his religion yes

About math? I doubt I'm qualified to tell either way if he's that good, but math is generally not a subject that rewards applied irrationality.

I'm irrational and deluded about how important dogs are, amongst other things. Irrationality is rarely an omnipresent or completely absent part of human thought.

Spock is fictional.

[cbayer]

17. Are you making the argument that one can't be a believer and a mathematician?

[dmallind]

18. Good lord no - Newton schnookers that one for a start, among many

I am however saying that one cannot apply the same rigid criteria for objective proofs that are the basis of mathematics to questions of religion and remain a believer. I'm assuming that like all humans very much including me, this fellow applies different types of decision making to different questions. I don't choose a car like I choose a stock investment.

[cbayer]

19. Ok, I see what you are saying.

That's the nice thing about having a big brain that is flexible. You can look at different things differently and use different tools to explore and discover different areas.

[bananas]

43. That's not true at all.

You wrote:

"I am however saying that one cannot apply the
same rigid criteria for objective proofs that are
the basis of mathematics to questions of
religion and remain a believer."

That's not true at all.

[eqfan592]

48. Actually, it is.

Unless you have some proofs you want to offer for the existence of god...?

[bananas]

51. Nope.

You and dmallind seem to think that mathematicians are required to only believe things which are proven.

That's not the case at all.

Mathematicians believe many things which aren't proven.

Wikipedia gives the Reimann hypothesis as an example:

"Few number theorists doubt that the Riemann hypothesis is true"

Even though there is no rigid objective proof that the Reimann hypothesis is true,
almost all number theorists believe it anyway.


You and dmallind are using a fallacious form of reasoning which is unfortunately very common among athiests.

It doesn't mean you're "irrational", it just means you're wrong.

Hope this helps!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjecture

A conjecture is a proposition that is unproven but is thought to be true and has not been disproven.

<snip>

Sometimes a conjecture is called a hypothesis when it is used frequently and repeatedly as an assumption in proofs of other results. For example, the Riemann hypothesis is a conjecture from number theory that (amongst other things) makes predictions about the distribution of prime numbers. Few number theorists doubt that the Riemann hypothesis is true (it is said that Atle Selberg was once a sceptic, and J. E. Littlewood always was). In anticipation of its eventual proof, some have proceeded to develop further proofs which are contingent on the truth of this conjecture. These are called conditional proofs: the conjectures assumed appear in the hypotheses of the theorem, for the time being.

<snip>

Not every conjecture ends up being proven true or false. The continuum hypothesis, which tries to ascertain the relative cardinality of certain infinite sets, was eventually shown to be undecidable (or independent) from the generally accepted set of axioms of set theory. It is therefore possible to adopt this statement, or its negation, as a new axiom in a consistent manner (much as we can take Euclid's parallel postulate as either true or false).

In this case, if a proof uses this statement, researchers will often look for a new proof that doesn't require the hypothesis (in the same way that it is desirable that statements in Euclidean geometry be proved using only the axioms of neutral geometry, i.e. no parallel postulate.) The one major exception to this in practice is the axiom of choice—unless studying this axiom in particular, the majority of researchers do not usually worry whether a result requires the axiom of choice.

<snip>

[eqfan592]

53. The very first sentence of your post was false.

"You and dmallind seem to think that mathematicians are required to only believe things which are proven. " Nowhere did either of us say ANYTHING even remotely close to that.

"You and dmallind are using a fallacious form of reasoning which is unfortunately very common among athiests. "

Is it our "form of reasoning" that is fallacious, or are you simply attributing arguments neither of us made to us and then trying to counter them? I think there's a term for that form of fallacious reasoning.....

EDIT: Also, from the very same wikipedia page you linked:

Formal mathematics is based on provable truth.

Emphasis NOT mine.

This coincides perfectly with dmallinds original statement about proofs being the basis for mathematics.

EDIT2: The article also states this:

These "proofs", however, would fall apart if it turned out that the hypothesis was false, so there is considerable interest in verifying the truth or falsity of conjectures of this type.

So no matter how much mathematicians may "believe" a mathematical conjecture used in a conditional proof, they are making efforts to prove that conjecture is true.

[bananas]

55. No, it wasn't false.

I said it "seemed" that way, and it still does. I can't read your mind, but it seems like you asked "Unless you have some proofs you want to offer for the existence of god...?" because you thought a proof of existence of god was required for belief in god by a mathematician.

Also, "formal" mathematics is just a part of mathematics, just as "pure" and "applied" math are just parts of mathematics. A lot of math is not formal. Here's an example by RJ Liption:

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/mathematical-intuition-what-is-it/

I once had a proof that needed only a lemma about the structure of the primes to be complete. It was about a communication lower bound that I was working at the time with Bob Sedgewick. We could not prove the lemma, nor could we find any references to anything like it. So we made an appointment to see the famous number theorist, Enrico Bombieri. He is a member of IAS, and was there at the time. So Bob and I went over to ask him about our lemma.

Bombieri listened very politely, asked a question or two for clarification, and said, “yes that lemma is surely correct.” We were thrilled, since this would make our proof complete. I then asked him for a reference. He looked at me and said:

Of course the lemma about primes is true, but it is completely hopeless to prove it.

He had great intuition about primes, but proving certain results was then and still is today completely beyond anything anyone can do.

And regarding your claim that "So no matter how much mathematicians may "believe" a mathematical conjecture used in a conditional proof, they are making efforts to prove that conjecture is true."

The fact is, mathematicians KNOW there are conjectures which are inherently unprovable,
in fact, as wikipedia points out, there are "infinitely many" statements which are "true but unprovable",
so no, mathematicians don't waste their time trying to prove every conjecture they believe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems

Gödel's first incompleteness theorem states that:

Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true,[1] but not provable in the theory (Kleene 1967, p. 250).

The true but unprovable statement referred to by the theorem is often referred to as “the Gödel sentence” for the theory. The proof constructs a specific Gödel sentence for each effectively generated theory, but there are infinitely many statements in the language of the theory that share the property of being true but unprovable. For example, the conjunction of the Gödel sentence and any logically valid sentence will have this property.

[eqfan592]

63. No, I did not even imply any such thing.

We were talking about thought processes, so unless you want to imply that mathematicians can only think in one way....

As for the rest, there is a huge difference between acknowledging the existence of conjectures that can't be proven and believing that such conjectures are absolutely true and using them in other proofs.

[rug]

20. I see. He must disable his reason when he prays.

Nice trick.

[dmallind]

21. When he decides that there is a god there to pray to, he must not apply mathematical criteria

or other criteria requiring not just deductive proof, but convincing inductive argument too. Because otherwise he would see there is no way to reach that decision.

Don't we all spply different criteria to different decisions though? I surely do. Do you claim that he approaches ontology with the same criteria for reaching conclusions that he does mathematics? Do you do that?

[rug]

22. He could apply his considerable reason and conclude faith is not subject to theorems.

Therfore, he does apply different criteria. That is using reason.

[cleanhippie]

23. Only if he is into pretzels.

Maybe the word you are looking for is rationalizing.

[rug]

24. That's not the word I'm looking for at the moment.

[cleanhippie]

25. Never is.

[rug]

27. Correct. The word was nitwit.

[cleanhippie]

29. Correct word for what?

Nitwit. thats a neat word. Do you hear it often?

[rug]

30. I love that word.

[cleanhippie]

31. What what it the correct word for?

[rug]

32. Don't worry. You're not a nitwit. I like you.

I always thought it described a person whose intelligence is the size of an insect's egg but the dictionary says it's from the German nicht, meaning not a wit.

Out.

[cleanhippie]

35. And you're not a nitwit. Still doesn't answer what it was the correct word for.

Why are you avoiding answering now?

[rug]

33. Here's the jury results.

Juror #1 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given
Juror #2 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given
Juror #3 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: He's calling the guy from the OP who chose the religious school over ivy league a nitwit from what I got out of the post.
Juror #4 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: jeez, grow a pair. *smacks alerter with rolled up newspaper*
Juror #5 voted to HIDE IT and said: It was a nitwit remark, a tad over the top for the flow of the thread.
Juror #6 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: I don't see an attack.

[cleanhippie]

34. Jury results for what?

[rug]

36. For whoever alerted my post.

[cleanhippie]

37. So what was it the word for?

You seem reluctant to answer.

[rug]

38. Ah, I see ls is in the house.

[cleanhippie]

42. What was it the correct word for?

[dmallind]

26. but ontology is surely subject to evidence and logic?

If not, what is it but free-form imagination?

[rug]

28. I think it is, but not necessarily observational evidence.

But ultimately religion does not rest on a hypothesis based on observed evidence but on a revelation which one can accept or reject. If it's accepted, reason proceeds from there in a manner not unlike reason proceeding from any datum.

[skepticscott]

41. So why do so many people proudly proclaim

the "evidence" for god, and point to what they observe all around them? Why have so many puffed-up theologians tried to gin up "proofs" of god's existence?

Are they all deluded to think such things are necessary or even possible? Or would that be you?

[LTX]

44. To the contrary.

Start with this question: Why are mathematicians more religious as a group than other scientists?

[bananas]

52. You're making several logical fallacies, see post #51. nt

[2ndAmForComputers]

61. I stand in awe.

"There's this person who is very good at Math and very religious, therefore religion is rational."

I want to type an accurate description of this argument you're trying to make, but if I did that my post could be locked. So I won't. Instead, I'll just...

[rug]

65. I look forward to your proof that it is the product of madness.

[eqfan592]

67. He doesn't have to in order to show your reasoning was flawed. (nt)

[rug]

68. Imputing an argument is not demonstrating flawed reasoning

beyond the imputer.

[2ndAmForComputers]

70. So you DO think this guy's existence is proof that religiuon is rational?

[rug]

71. Read the previous post.

[2ndAmForComputers]

72. I did.

It means precisely nothing.

[2ndAmForComputers]

60. Watch "A Beautiful Mind." In addition to that, read about Kurt Godel.

[rug]

66. His math eroded in proportion to his reason.

[Jim__]

13. It's his choice of course.

I can't help but wonder if he will get as good of a math education as he would in, say, an Ivy League college.

[rug]

14. He definitely won't have the same academic resources but who knows where his interests will take him

[daaron]

39. Pure mathematics is great because it is not a science.

It's the fine art of proof-writing, which requires the most rigorous application of symbolic logic, and a great reserve of creative problem solving. Of course, applied mathematics is distinct fork of mathematics -- the fork whose tines underpin all of the hard sciences. Pure mathematicians are more akin to poets or psychologists than physicists: they enjoy the freedom to assume any useful axiom needed to construct unending parades of logical arguments.

In itself, mathematics says nothing about nature, or reality - it is only when used to model empirical observation that we call it 'applied' math, and it becomes useful in making scientific predictions.

I guess I'm saying it's unremarkable to discover that a pure mathematician believes in God. It would be more remarkable to discover that an applied mathematician or physicist was (since religious belief is statistically less frequent in physical sciences).

[rug]

40. That's a good observation. I hadn't realized that fine distinction.

[cynatnite]

45. In college our advance algebra prof also taught Ethics and attended law school...

He was not a practicing lawyer, but he loved mathmatics and he was an amazing teacher, too. I nearly failed basic algebra in high school. In his classes, I made all A's.

[LTX]

46. John Baez, a particularly erudite physicist, stated it this way:

"The problem of course is that in the standard modern picture, science is empirical, based on induction, and tends to favor a materialistic ontology, while mathematics is non-empirical, based on deduction, and tends to favor a Platonist/Pythagorean ontology… yet somehow they need each other! So, mathematics is not only the queen and handmaiden of the sciences – it’s the secret mistress as well, a source of romantic fascination but also some embarrassment."

Scott Aaronson has some highly entertaining comments on the subject on his blog.

[daaron]

47. Or John von Neumann to a student:

"Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."

Or appertaining more directly, he also said:

I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth — which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations — that mathematical ideas originate in empirics. But, once they are conceived, the subject begins to live a peculiar life of its own and is ... governed by almost entirely aesthetical motivations. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much "abstract" inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. Whenever this stage is reached the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas.

[LTX]

49. I like the underlying idea of the latter quote.

A kind of cross-breeding for genetic health.

[daaron]

50. I know, huh? Von Neumann's one of my all-time favs. nt

[tama]

58. Doctot Strangelove

Great mathematician, but I can't much like his politics and ethics and infatuation with the Bomb. From wikipedia:

During a Senate committee hearing he described his political ideology as "violently anti-communist, and much more militaristic than the norm". He was quoted in 1950 remarking, "If you say why not bomb [Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today. If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?".[62] As a result, he partly inspired the character of 'Doctor Strangelove' in Doctor Strangelove.

[Jim__]

69. According to wikipedia, the quote that you cite is unsourced.

According to wikiquotes ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:John_von_Neumann ).

[tama]

57. Science is as science does

This theoretical physicist sees physics as generalized number theory:

A very important point is that there is no need to distinguish between physical objects and their mathematical description (as quantum states in Hilbert space of some short). Physical object is its mathematical description. This allows to circumvent the question "But what about theories: do also theories exist physically or in some other sense?". Quantum state is theory about physical state and physicist and mathematician exists in quantum jumps between them. Physical worlds define the Platonia of the mathematician and conscious existence is hopping around in this Platonia: from zero energy state to a new one. And ZEO allows all possible jumps! Could physicist or mathematician wish anything better !

The identification of physical (or "objective&quot existence as mathematical existence raises the question whether physics could be unique from the requirement that the mathematical description with which it is identical exists. In finite-dimensional case this is certainly not the case. Given finite-D manifold allows infinite number of different geometries. In infinite-dimensional case the situation changes dramatically. One possible additional condition is that the physics in question is maximally rich in structure besides existing mathematically! Quantum criticality has been my own phrasing for this principle and the motivation comes that at criticality long range fluctuations set on and the system has fractal structure and is indeed extremely richly structured.

This does not yet say much about what are the basic objects of this possibly existing infinite-dimensional space. One can however generalize Einstein's "Classical physics as space-time geometry" program to "Quantum physics as infinite dimensional geometry of world of classical worlds (WCW)" program. Classical worlds are identified as space-time surfaces since also the finite-dimensional classical version of the program must be realized. What is new is "surface": Einstein did not consider space-time as a surface but as an abstract 4-manifold and this led to the failure of the geometrization program. Sub-manifold geometry is however much richer than manifold geometry and gives excellent hopes about the geometrization of electro-weak and color interactions besides gravitation.

If one assumes that space-time as basic objects are surfaces of some dimension in some higher-dimensional space, one can ask whether it is possible for WCW to have a geometry. If one requires geometrization of quantum physics, this geometry must be Kähler. This is a highly non-trivial condition. The simplest spaces of this kind are loop spaces relating closely to string models: their Kähler geometry is unique from the existence of Riemann connection. This geometry has also maximal possible symmetries defined by Kac-Moody algebra, which looks very physical. The mere mathematical existence implies maximal symmetries and maximally beatiful world!

http://matpitka.blogspot.com/2012/05/universe-from-nothing.html#comments

[daaron]

59. Hm. I will have to pass on this, thx. nt

[tama]

64. As you please

to me connecting the dots is pleasing.

[laconicsax]

56. I've read the article and this thread several times now and have to wonder:

Why does anyone not connected to the kid give a shit?

He wants to study mathematics and be in a religious environment, so he chose a school that fit the bill.

Why is this news?

[2ndAmForComputers]

62. See my post 61.