Everyday Maths

 

Of course, it was Descartes himself who first used his own system of Cartesian co-ordinates to locate the missing segment of his steak and kidney pie, although it would take a few more centuries before Gödel’s incompleteness theorem could account for just why he had mislaid the errant portion of pie in the first place. 

However, few of us these days can even contemplate creating a full shopping list without at least some awareness of Russell’s paradox and the dilemma it creates over whether we should include Brussels sprouts or cauliflower, but not both on that particular list, at least if the supermarket we are proposing to visit exists in Euclidean space. 

The problem of finding a parking pace in the car park of a non-Euclidean supermarket will have to wait for another time, another of these articles and a more robust set of mathematical trousers than the ones I am currently residing in. However, I think it is possible that we can assume that whichever trousers we are wearing at the time they will exist somewhere in Hilbert space, unless they are – of course – in the wash. 

So, until then I will bid you farewell and remind you to bring along a sharp pencil next time as we will be discussing the Turing test, and how to prise it out, using only a well-sharpened pencil, should it get lodged behind the sofa.