Excerpt:
Thanksgiving morning, as I was doing my research, I made a tweet or two, as mental markers, and as it happens, an iFriend who is a mathematician saw my tweets and that that prompted a short conversation where I learned (if I understood him correctly) that the aspects of mathematics that seem most self-evident, as in 1,2,3,4… is actually the least well-founded.
Today, as I talked about this with my wife on our long drive back from Flatbush to Montauk, I tried to conceive of a race of beings who apprehended the ratio of a circles diameter to its circumference, ratio of the hypotenuse of a right triangle with two equal shorter sides to those shorter sides as fundamental concepts, and have to build upon such a foundation novel ideas like whole numbers. I doubt it’s an original thought, but my brain couldn’t take the idea any further....
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