The greatest tragedy of German mathematics

#maths #physics

00:00 - 01:00 Introduction
01:00 - 03:46 The tragedy
03:46 - 05:49 Relation between math and sciences
05:49 - 09:27 The content of Courant-Hilbert Vol 1.

[HillCountryDemo]

A fascinating review of math and history. Thank you for this post!

[thomasblackwell]

Great video and the costar (the cat) was great too definitely a beautiful one!

[timhourigan]

Thanks for the wonderful video! You have convinced me that I definitely need a copy of "Courant & Hilbert: Methods of Mathematical Physics - Volume 1." (By the way, your cat has convinced me that the presence and purring of my own cat during my sessions of intense study are essential to remind me that I need to take a break every once in a while so that I can maintain calm moments of mental relaxation. :-}D )

[ominollo]

This video was a YouTube suggestion! I subscribed right away 👍

[marym.b]

Just came across your video...i really loved it.. it made me want to read the book ❤️

[jmguevarajordan]

Courant-Hilbert is a well regarded book. Courant was a 'master' of the variational approach. Courant style is a little bit terse and 'verbose' at times. The problem with this book is that it is outdated, it was written before the invention or creation of functional analysis. Courant tried to update it by adding appendixes and a third volumen on numerics but it was not an easy task and he got old and died. Nice video👍

[peterhall]

I have both Volumes on my shelf. The content is done ar a sophisticated level by today's textbooks.

[David_Lloyd-Jones]

Warning: there is a vicious carnivorous animal lurking in your office.

[tanmayjyothis]

Do you need to know physics to study from this book?

[tinkeringtim]

So frustrating. Hilbert was the architect of tearing maths into pieces in the first place.

I have been on a long deep dive through the original materials from 1700s to present.

In a nutshell, Hilbert and his Göttingen gang created the problems in order to solve them their way.

They didn't win any of their arguments with logic, they won through manipulation. What Hilbert brought to mathamatics was religious zealotry and the use of political manipulation to establish his parasitic school and grow to take over most of mathematics.

One example of their reality manipulation was "Non-Euclidean Geometry and the 5th postulate". Hilbert flat out lied about its logical status and actively crushed the careers of anyone who dared call out his story of geometry and how he fixed it was a completely untennable straw man. Constructivists were furious at his outright garbage lies, and gradually all got squashed out of academia.

There's some really dark history behind the fairytale pedagogy fed to students of maths and physics.

Euler was a similar "antichrist of mathematics" to Hilbert.

There's no need for the tangled mess mathematics is in today. There's many things made mysterious and magical purely to make the protagonists sound like great thinkers.

Gauss pointed out that if people thought of i as "bredth" there would be no issue and he was spot on. But the actual fact that the "complex numbers" are just the Europeans _finally_ understanding why perpendicularity matters was not such a grand story as the mental gymnastics we are forced through to make it look clever.

We've spent over 100 years adding more and more credibility to what was (and still is) nothing more than a confidence trick.

[johnryskamp]

Do yourself a favor. Eead

A. Garciadiego, Bertrand Russell and the Origins of the Set-theoretic 'Paradoxes.'