1+1= 2: True, but not the whole story.
This posting is not about patents. But it is about seeing things more clearly.
How things are presented can make an enormous difference in how they are understood. I’m going to show that 2= 1+1 is a richer mathematical statement than the statement set-out in the title.
My thinking on this came out of a conversation held a over several mugs of beer where the topic of multiple universes came up. Someone asked the question: Would the laws of mathematics always be true in other universes? This got me thinking about examples - examples always help in clarifying concepts. Read the rest of this entry »