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From: Kins Collins (04/29/97)
To: Robin Smith, John Dunne
                           Subject:            
                           Kins back from trip

Here's some unexpected mail for you, Robin (and John you too)!

I thought both of you might enjoy this personal note written for my colleagues 
 here at Apple.

Kins
---------------
To all--

As you may know, I was away for a few days to attend a family reunion at my
 mother's place in La Jolla.  My mother is 98 yrs. old and doing fine.  I showed
 her how to use the Mac (PowerBook 2300c), and together we wrote a letter,
 balanced her checkbook, drew some KidPix pictures, explored the Internet, etc.
 Then she played a solitaire card game on it by herself.  

On the other hand, my composer brother refused to even touch the PowerBook, could
 not be brought to treat it neutrally like a glorified pencil or typewriter. He
 sees it as something profane and not worthy of contact with human artistic
 creations -- even to print his sheet music ("music should be hand-written to
 convey properly the love in it" -- he's back in the Middle Ages,
 pre-Guttenburg), though he did like the idea of being able to make a slight
 editorial change in some music score without having to write down the whole
 score a second time.  (At least our family consists of individuals!)

While there I also meet my sister's third husband (no divorces; the first two
 simply died of natural causes).  I hadn't seen my sister for thirty years.

The high point of the visit in my mind was when I tried to reveal to my family
 some small part of my worldview, namely that I consider mathematics to have a
 unique and superior place among the sciences, it being the sole human
 intellectual endeavor, whether art, science, or religion, that is truly
 cumulative, in the sense that what the ancient Greeks discovered is still valid
 today.  (The Greeks were the inventors of theoretical mathematics.  Their
 forerunners, the Babylonians, Egyptians, even the early Chinese, just engaged in
 practical mathematics -- land measurement, business transactions, tax
 collections -- and never went beyond to the idea of proof.)  

Assertions of mathematical facts, like the Pythagorean theorem, and the formal
 proofs of these, are both still valid today.  The mathematics that came after
 the Greeks did not replace the accomplishments of the Greeks, but added to them.
 Not even physics can claim such cumulative advance, since in that field
 Galileo, for instance, disproves by experiment Aristotle's theory of
 gravitation, showing that the older theory was WRONG and way off base, or
 Einstein disproves Newton's theory of gravitation, showing that the older theory
 was WRONG and yet produced nearly correct results.  In physics the old is
 REPLACED by the new.  Not so (usually) in mathematics.  

In mathematics the old stays, and the new is just added to it cumulatively.  When
 we move from physics to art, we see a kind of development that doesn't even 
 pretend to be evolutionary: in art there is nothing but a series of fads, new 
 fads replacing old -- with the enjoying public being manipulated by the 
 influential few -- (though I concede that most critics view the flux 
 to be a kind of deterministic organic unfolding).  And in religion, even the
 respect and veneration that new art might show for the old is absent.  The old
 religion is denied even the use of the word and is called "superstition" or
 "pagan cult" or "false belief", etc., and is denigrated as evil.  Or else 
 the old beliefs are simply trivialized and denatured, being called "myth", 
 "stories of the people", and "cute".

To illustrate my point about the enduring validly of mathematical truth, I
 presented my family members with a proof of "doubling the square" by Hippocrates
 of Chios (400 B.C.), which provoked "Is that important?" from my composer
 brother, to "I haven't any idea of what you are talking about" from my mother,
 who though old physically (98), usually is crystal clear of mind and can
 understand, in other contexts, complicated sentences and convoluted arguments. 
 My clever sister, on the other hand, (who's just a housewife) the moment I had
 said rhetorically, "Now how can we go from a square with an area of 1 sq. unit
 to a square with an area of 2 sq. units," said unhesitatingly "Just make the new
 square have a side of sqrt of 2"... which sort of spoiled the dramatic effect I
 was working towards, but I persevered to the end, on the assumption that her
 remark was a leap of thought the others were not quick enough to follow.  So I
 proceeded.  "Consider the diagonal of the first square... etc., and since we
 know from the Pythagorean theorem... etc., etc."

My larger conclusion, flowing from the intact validity of this modest
 2400-year-old example, was: "And since mathematical truths, once discovered, ARE
 eternal and unchanging, they are really true -- unlike everything else that man
 pronounces."  Such was my presentation to my family, and maybe they can
 understand my world better now.

Today Tuesday, 29apr97, I'm back at work.

Kins

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From: John Dunne (04/30/97)
To: Kins Collins
                            Subject:            
                            Kins back from trip            
Kins,

Ok, its my turn on the soapbox.  I have to respond.  You are welcome to
 toss it out as religious nonsense, but please read it.

[... text temporarily omitted ...]

-- John 

==================================================================================
From: Robin Smith (05/02/97)
To: Kins Collins

On 30 Apr 97 at 14:36, Kins Collins wrote:
> I thought you might enjoy this personal note written for my colleagues 
> here at Apple.
> Kins

Kins--I'm glad to see you are still at Apple, in these parlous
times.

I assume the mention of your brother as being back in the Middle Ages 
relates not to his music but rather to his attitude toward 
technology.

==========================
/Robin Smith/
Smith@robin.cat.com
==========================

==================================================================================
From: Kins Collins (05/05/97)
To: Robin Smith
                           Subject:                   
                           FWD> Math/Religion             
Robin,
You may be bored by religious controversy (as I usually am), but still
 I send you this elaboration of my "Kins back from trip" note, which 
 I wrote to my colleague here at Apple, John Donne.  John is an 
 all-round great guy, and a friend, but at the same time a devout Christian. 
 He immediately replied to my first note (about the uniqueness of mathematical 
 "truth") by saying that religion (he means Christianity) also shares this 
 property of  having remained true over several thousand years, and "perhaps 
 too mathematics is that way because God has endowed it so."

Enjoy!

Kins

==================================================================================
From: Kins Collins (05/05/97)
To: John Dunne
                           Subject:                      
                           Math/Religion               
John,
It is true that in my report of the family visit, I drew some conclusions --
 almost as an afterthought.  I was aiming, though, at making "innocent"
 historical observations that everyone could agree to, such as "Statements in
 physics (laws) do not accumulate, they replace earlier ones, which have been
 shown to be false", e.g., from Newton's law of gravity we can derive: "Light
 rays passing by a massive object will NOT be deflected from a Euclidian straight
 line," and I think that ALL physicists TODAY would agree in saying that the
 Newtonian prediction has been repeatedly shown to be false, and so the theory
 from which it is deduced is thereby also shown to be false.  The progression
 from Newton's gravity to Einstein's gravity is typical of progress in physics. 
 Advances there consist of continual replacement and broadening of previous
 theories.

In art there isn't this sort of "progress", though here I think there would be
 less agreement among scholars of my assertion, and certainly not among art
 critics.  On the other hand, it is simply a fact of everyday life in
 mathematics, that despite a bit of tightening of rigor as to what is regarded as
 a correct proof, ALL mathematicians today (of whatever nationality or religion)
 will agree that Pythagoras' and Archimedes' proofs of this and that have NEVER
 been replaced -- and don't need to be, because they were correct in 300 B.C. and
 are correct today. 

I was observing something here that I believe you and most other observers would
 agree to.  Perhaps we should leave my other, controversial, observations about
 religion out of the discussion for now.  But I do believe there is not the
 consensus among knowledgeable individuals re religion as there is among
 physicists or mathematicians.  There is no majority view in religion. 
 Christianity is a minority religion.  But then so are all the religions that are
 even more popular than Christianity, like Hinduism and Buddhism. No religion has
 a majority.  

As to religion being like mathematics in regard to accumulating new beliefs on
 top of old ones and not denouncing the old ones, it is true that
 Judaism/Christianity/Mohammedanism do not follow what I observe to be the more
 common practice, and perhaps these three religions should be considered a single
 religious evolutionary thread.  As far as denouncing much earlier religions,
 though, don't Christians denounce religions practicing human sacrifice or
 cannibalism?  Does any Christian really say there is God and also there are Zeus
 and Apollo all living in heaven.  No, Christians say there is God, and anyone
 who believes in Zeus and Apollo has false belief.  Religions are not cumulative
 in their beliefs.

On the other hand, despite the obvious relatedness, there remain sharp
 theological cleavages between Christianity and Mohammedanism, since the latter
 denounces the former's elevation of a man to a position of divinity. 
 Mohammedans also believe that God wants men to have four wives, whereas
 Christians say God has told them he wants at most one.  Can we use deductive
 logic from first principles or else the experimental method, to solve this
 problem about what it is that God really wants?  I don't see how, since there
 would not be agreement about what the first principles are, or about what
 constitutes a correct deduction, or what is proper in the way of experimental
 evidence for God's will.  Yet Arab mathematicians and Christian, Hindu,
 Mohammedan, Jewish, or atheistic mathematicians all agree that Euclid's proof of
 the infinity of primes is valid.  It is this agreement that makes mathematics
 unique among the creations of man.
Kins

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From: Robin Smith (05/06/97)
To: Kins Collins
						RE>FWD>Re Math/Religion

Yep, we had a fellow like that at ZZZZZZZ for a while.  Kind of 
interesting to talk to, the first time anyway.  And, of course, I get 
a total immersion exposure every fall during my pilgrimage to 
Kentucky for my annual gospel music fix.

My religious enlightenment has yet to occur.

How are things at Apple, by the way?

==========================
/Robin Smith/
Smith@robin.cat.com
==========================

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From: Kins Collins (05/05/97)
To: Robin Smith
                        RE>>FWD>Kins back from trip     
Robin,
Yes at Apple here 50% of the contractors were laid off (plus 25% of the
 regular employees), but our group is working on critical software and
 no one was axed (though some positions vacated earlier through normal
 attrition are not being re-filled).  The "critical software" I speak
 of is just internal bug-reporting and customer-complaints databases. 
 Anyway, if I had been let go, I would have no trouble getting another
 Mac-programming contract -- for strange as it may seem to someone like
 yourself who reads newspapers and no doubt also Business Week (which all
 give Apple an incredibly bad and inaccurate press), there is a great
 shortage of Mac programmers all through the US.  I turn down several
 contract offers every week (but I do add the requester to MY database
 of future prospects!) and the stated hourly rate is going into the
 sky.
 
The perils of living in the semi-wilds: 
 One of my six cats has been missing for two months, yet in response to
 my tree postings of "Missing Cat", I've located approximately where
 she (or a cat that looks like her) is roaming about.  I'm always ready
 to dash to any one of the four people (housewives or retirees) who
 fairly often report a sighting -- but no luck yet for my own sighting
 of her.

Kins

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