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[Esenin-Volpin on counting] ()
Famous dissident, mathematician/logician/follower of intuitionistic approach, and son of Sergey Esenin) was once asked whether he believed in numbers. What number specifically? Let’s say “three”. Esenin-Volpin quickly said “yes”. What about “ten”? E-V said “yes” after a short pause. What about “100”? E-V said “yes” after a long pause…
I don’t think he should be counting till 100 (in case of 100), though. I think the world is rather loglinear than linear - see Weber-Fechner Law etc. So, 100 is only twice as far from 0 as 10, and 1,000,000 is just 6 times farther…
According to a polemical article by Adrian Mathias, Robert Solovay showed that Bourbaki’s definition of the number 1, written out using the formalism in the 1970 edition of Théorie des Ensembles, requires
2,409,875,496,393,137,472,149,767,527,877,436,912,979,508,338,752,092,897 ≈ 2.4 ⋅ 10^54 symbols and
871,880,233,733,949,069,946,182,804,910,912,227,472,430,953,034,182,177 ≈ 8.7 ⋅ 10^53 connective links used in their treatment of bound variables. Mathias notes that at 80 symbols per line, 50 lines per page, 1,000 pages per book, this definition would fill up 6 ⋅ 10^47 books. (If each book weighed a kilogram, these books would be about 200,000 times the mass of the Milky Way.)
- Don Zagier. How often should you beat your kids DON ZAGIER. University. of. Maryland. College Park,. MD 20742.
A result is proved which shows, roughly speaking, that one should beat one’s kids every day …