Last night, I sat down in my hammock and started reading pg. 985 of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. This is the classic novel of Russian life at the time of Napolean's empire. I recommend reading the entire text sometime in your life when you have the time to tackle its 1455 pages.
You will probably understand my amazement when I tell you that Tolstoy started Book 11, Chapter I by discussing Zeno's paradox of The Tortoise and Achilles!!!!!!!
He then goes on to discuss the implications of calculus on the study of history. Some of you might find these three pages quite interesting. You can read this short chapter here.
I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this as, I imagine, would Mr. Janke.
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1 comment:
Reading Tolstoy's hitorical approach to the Tortoise and Achilles problem made me realise how so manythings realte to each other. In class, the day we discused the problem, I was trying to explain why counting each infinite portions of of the problem wouldn't give us an answer. To me, it was obvious that achilles would pass the turtoise somewhere during the second second of the race. Tolstoy supports his explanation by referring to more common situations like the oak buds and the wind, the watch and the bells and so on. These examples in a way take the abstract idea of "infinite" sums (which many people can't grasp completely) and converts it into a more accesible form for the human mind. We can't assume that Achilles can never beat the tortoise just because our minds aren't capable of completly understanding the logic of infinite sections of a problem like this one. Concentrating on each individual section of the race will never tell us the real answer to the problem. Its like when people start blaming one individual for a whole big problem. If they don't look at all the people that are involved, at the group as a whole, they'll never get to the right solution. See, we never really got the slution of the problem until we took everything together and worked on it as the SUM (whole) of an infinite series.
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