Description: MIT 20.219 Becoming the Next Bill Nye: Writing and Hosting the Educational Show, IAP 2015. View the complete course: http://ocw.mit.edu/20-219IAP15.
Instructor: Yuliya Klochan
License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
More information at http://ocw.mit.edu/terms
More courses at http://ocw.mit.edu
GUEST SPEAKER: Guess who likes to live dangerously? That's right. Set theorists. Or, more generally, mathematicians. To this day, we have no standard definition of what they do.
The 20th century mathematician Bertrand Russell said that math is the subject where we don't really know what we're doing nor whether it is true. And actually, that's not that much of an exaggeration. Mathematics is highly ambiguous and mysterious still. Take, for example, the supported and yet unanswered question--
Is mathematics real? Is the arithmetic we learn in elementary school true? We believe that it's true, because, well, it's worked so well for us. But, as young logician Kurt Godel proved, we can never know for sure.
In short, math is messy. There's no way around that. So what exactly does this mean for us? Why do set theorists continue to live on the edge of this shaky mathematical precipice? Could machines really be smarter than humans? And could The Matrix scenario really happen to us? Luckily, Godel answers that and so much more.