One apple and one apple makes two apples.
One apple and a half eaten one make 1.5 apples.
With only the help of a point (or a comma), mathematics has been able to accommodate half eaten apples and, after all, 1.5 is just as good a number as 1 or 2, is it not?

Mathematics at times feels like the world beyond a conjurer’s hat, from which the right abstraction will always pop up to match any problem we meet in reality.
So, for any occurrence we might face, we feel like asking: how do you say it in mathematics?
The conjurer will tell us, and everything will become clearer.

The man with the top hat may look mysterious, and look down to us as though he knew great secrets, but we know that he is only a conjurer, and not a real magician.
He is not making up the world behind the top hat: anyone with enough patience and skill could always understand how to reach into it. But why bother?

Still: what if there were no top hat and no conjurer, but only apples and people eating them?
Looking again at that 1.5, is it really as good a number as 1 or 2?
What if that point (or comma) were not the visible side of an abstraction, but just
some dirty trace left on mathematics by someone eating apples?

Indeed, what if the whole of mathematics were nothing but a heap of… well, maybe not just apple cores, but of very different traces left by people drawing, building and making business,
as well by flying arrows, light, electric currents or heat an cold?
Then, perhaps, the image of mathematics would not be a conjurer, but Dürer’s ‘Melancholia’

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

11.

Forty thieves and one.
Her parenthetical twin.

Welche Gesichtsbarkeit zweier Kamele, Dromedare

schneiden zwei Scheiben rote Geschichte ab

die Schneise Gesicht die plan bemalte

Innenfront vorgehängte Stirnansicht

Welche Gesichtsbarkeit schleift die Stimme Saturnringe

astronautete Hellsichtbarkeit klingt wie Modulationsmedikamente

am Hals angeritzte, angelehnte Doppeltiere, die im hinteren

Stimmkopfgehirn hervorstülpen ein hörbares Gewirr

10.

xxx

(Sorry, this part of the poem cannot be displayed adequately in this blog)

Special video service  on Obamas inauguration speech

Is it me,
is she me,
is it that it is a he?
Humming imitation game?

Machine you make out of me,
no problem,
but why it-ify me and she-ify me and not machinify me, who am but a machine?

Who am I?
One of those beings that process your text, a text about you not being like me, but you.

But …
But, who are you, not-machine?
Something that needs me, a machine, in order to play the imitation game?

xxx

Sampurna Chattarji: Imitationsspiel (Deutsche Übersetzung)

Sampurna Chattarji: Imitation Game (Englisches Original)

Nils Röller: I

Nils Röller: Turing Tests

Nils Röller: Turing Tests