[UA] Warping Reality with Mathematics

[Timothy Ferguson]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Raymond O McCubrey" <mccubrey at cs.usm.maine.edu>
To: <ua at lists.uchicago.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2000 4:25 PM
Subject: [UA] Warping Reality with Mathematics


> I read someone mention use of a math school.
> Being a graduate student in math who's interested a lot in
> geometry, analysis, and topology, I thought I'd give you my greatest
> desire of how I would like to warp reality with math.
>
> My first use of "magic" with math, would be that I could take any object
> in the real world, and change it into another object. Famous quote, "A
> topolgist eats his  coffee and drinks his doughnut."

I'd be kinda inclined to let your lot escape bindings using quantumn
tunneling...and make stuff out of no-where provided you were willing to
handle the occassional anti-matter object cropping up and
mutually-anhiliating anything in the area.

> Another thing I would want to do is be able to collapse things. Suppose I
> had a ball bouncing towards me, I'd simply like to make it into a
> line. Turn a car into a umbrella, or unfold umrella into an infinite
> plane!

This is topology, basically, as done in Castle Roogna by Piers Anthony...

> My blast style would be to create simple geometrical objects and strike
> people with them. Cones impaling themselves on a person, or a plane
> cutting someone's hand off.

I'm coolwith that, but see caveat above...

> Lastly, that taboo suggested was awful for me! How else can I do math
> without using pure math? It's simply not possible!! I guess the real thing
> would be to learn it in such a way that you don't use the very pure
> concepts in math, just simple intuitive thinking. So the mathomancer,
> really can show you the intuitive parts, but if they realize the pureness
> beyond it, they loose all magic charges.

You could get a fixation with one of the great puzzles of maths, like
proving "Every number beyond two is the sum of two primes", but never
actually be able to prove it, because to do so would change the theories of
applied mathematics and lose not only you, but all other calculators their
charges.  Or maybe only disproofs, like for Fermat's Last Theorem, suck up
everyone's charges...

Or, you could say that if your outcome was a proof, you'd get a major and
everyone else would lose their charges...




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