Re: The reality of sets, on a scale of 1 to 10 [Was: The non-existence of "dark numbers"]

Jim Burns <james.g.burns@att.net> wrote:

On 3/27/2025 1:50 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

Moebius <invalid@example.invalid> wrote:

Am 27.03.2025 um 12:18 schrieb Alan Mackenzie:

WM <wolfgang.mueckenheim@tha.de> wrote:

Crank talk.
You don't understand limits, as I've already said.
Have you really got a degree in mathematics?
It seems unlikely.

WM doesn't have a degree in mathematics.

He denied not having one.
Most of the time,

Hmmm.

Most of the time,
people don't outright lie on Usenet.
They twist and turn,
answering direct questiongs evasively and inadequately,
and assert half truths.

My working theory at the moment is that
WM has some university degree which had
a small component of mathematics, but
that part of his degree didn't cover
rigorous analysis or rigorous set theory,
or anything much else rigorous.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_M%C3%BCckenheim
[Google->Eng]
⎛ From 1973 to 1977, Mückenheim studied physics with
⎜ minors in mathematics, astronomy and chemistry ...
⎜
⎜ In 1979, he obtained his doctorate in physics with
⎜ a dissertation on elastic photon scattering on
⎝ the ¹²²uranium, ...

OK.  For some reason, it didn't occur to me that WM would have a
Wikipedia page.  If only he'd stuck to posting knowledgeably about his
area of expertise.  That would surely be very interesting.

⎛ For the record, my (JB's) own formal education ends with
⎜ a bachelor's degree in physics and
⎝ minors in mathematics and computer science.

But somehow you've managed to pick up the fundamentals of maths.  :-)

For what it's worth,
on paper, Mückenheim is more qualified than I am.
I suspect that that irks him to no end.

His outpourings on this newsgroup (as well as on its German
counterpart) pretty much rule out systematic study of the foundations
of mathematics.

He studied at Göttingen, which was at the forefront of mathematical
development in the past, and likely is in the present too.  Surely it is
likely that any maths course there, even as a subsidiary part of another
main degree, is going to cover the fundamentals pretty thoroughly.

I am honestly mystified by
what I need to explain to Mückenheim,
someone who apparently has taken
upper.level courses in mathematics.

Am I unusual in having had to prove things
in such courses, for homework and for tests?

Not at all.

But I have a theory.

There once was a poster of the crankish persuasion,
convinced that he was going to prove
Fermat's Last Theorem at a highschool level of difficulty.
He seemed to know very little mathematics.

Yes, I remember.  I even remember his name.

I had some reason to look back over
his much.earlier posts, and
I was surprised to find that
that, much _earlier_ he apparently knew _more_
than the same (?) poster later, _after_ years of
arguing mathematics with mathematicians.

I noticed the same pattern with Archimedes Plutonium.  I posted to and
lurked on this newsgroup for a short while ~25 years ago, and my memory
of him when I came back to the group quite recently was of a cogent
thinker.  I was at first surprised and disappointed to see the
deterioration.

My theory is that
trying to defend bullshit rots the brain.

Interesting.  Maybe the constant mental stress of defending the said
bullshit against continual correction over many years takes its toll.

--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).