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254 sats \ 4 replies \ @south_korea_ln 2 Sep \ parent \ on: The Liar's Paradox the_stacker_muse
(can't remember if Hofstadter did)

Douglas Hofstadter and his butterflies.

From here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-first-sightings-of-hofstadters-butterfly-emerged-from-a-happy-accident/

Didn't know he was also a famous philosopher (at the same time, weren't they all philosophers, the physicists of old times?)

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72 sats \ 1 reply \ @optimism 2 Sep

I like how he's realistic about probably not being able to truly understand the current science. I feel that more and more often myself where I need real time to get it.

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130 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln 3 Sep

Yeah, gone are the times that scientists (or specialists from any technical field, for that matter) could have a decent grasp of the whole field, or even several fields. I barely understand what my office colleague is working on.

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130 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 2 Sep

I didn't know about the butterflies. this is so cool!

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130 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln 3 Sep

Yeah, it's pretty cool that he made this huge contribution to math during his graduate studies and then mostly switched fields to become even more prolific.

Very humble guy, it seems. He knew he could not solve those (Harper) equations analytically, so he provided one of the first computer-assisted solutions to them.

I have generated many such butterflies in my work in recent years. His mathematical curiosity from 1976 was realized experimentally only a little more than 10 years ago.

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