{"id":69,"date":"2015-06-13T20:20:35","date_gmt":"2015-06-13T20:20:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/?p=69"},"modified":"2015-06-13T20:20:35","modified_gmt":"2015-06-13T20:20:35","slug":"mathematics-in-classic-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/?p=69","title":{"rendered":"Mathematics in Classic Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The Brothers Karamazov<\/em>, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, is at least as complicated and full of ideas as any \u201cspace-opera\u201d, so it should not be surprising to find this on its pages:\u00a0 \u201cif God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions in space.\u00a0 Yet there have been and still are geometers and philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely, the whole of being, was only created in Euclid\u2019s geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity.\u00a0 I have come to the conclusion that, since I can\u2019t understand even that, I can\u2019t expect to understand about God.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dostoyevsky published this work in 1880 so he was well aware of non-Euclidean geometry, which developed in the early 19th century as Bolyoi, a Hungarian, and the Russian mathematician Lobachevsky, created hyperbolic geometry, and later Riemann created elliptic geometry.\u00a0 Still, it surprised me to find the parallel postulate mentioned in this classic.\u00a0 Then there is the line about \u201conly three dimensions in space.\u201d\u00a0 Obviously before any hints about Einstein\u2019s \u201cspace-time.\u201d\u00a0 And finally, I was struck by \u201cif God exists and if He really did create the world.\u201d\u00a0 The novel is jammed packed with religion and philosophy, all wrapped inside Russian Orthodoxy and European atheism.\u00a0 What kind of cosmos did Dostoyevsky imagine in which God exists and yet did not create the world?\u00a0 That sounds like an interesting setting for some future sci-fi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, is at least as complicated and full of ideas as any \u201cspace-opera\u201d, so it should not be surprising to find this on its pages:\u00a0 \u201cif God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of Euclid [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions\/70"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}