{"id":1534,"date":"2017-02-05T22:52:22","date_gmt":"2017-02-05T22:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/caelifera\/?p=1534"},"modified":"2017-02-05T22:52:22","modified_gmt":"2017-02-05T22:52:22","slug":"book-proofs-and-refutations-the-logic-of-mathematical-discovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/caelifera\/2017\/02\/05\/book-proofs-and-refutations-the-logic-of-mathematical-discovery\/","title":{"rendered":"Book: Proofs and Refutations, The Logic of Mathematical Discovery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b>Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery<\/b> by Imre Lakatos<\/p>\n<p>The flow is a mental state in which you are totally immersed in what you are doing.  It&#8217;s been a long time since I got into the flow while reading a book, but this book did it for me.  Written as a socratic dialogue it is a discussion between a teacher and many students who work on proving Euler&#8217;s polyhedron formula.  The great thing about this book is that the proof (really plural proofs) here are easily comprehensible to someone with only a small mathematical background, but the way in which the story unfolds is both dramatic and insightful.  Or at least it was for me.<\/p>\n<p>The best book I&#8217;ve read in a few years, I highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in how mathematics and mathematicians work, and in general to anyone who wonders about how discovery and newness appear in the world.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d give you mine, but Imma dog ate it (apparently she had some disagreements with Gamma):<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/caelifera\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/IMG_20170118_080822-675x900.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"675\" height=\"900\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-1536\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery by Imre Lakatos The flow is a mental state in which you are totally immersed in what you are doing. It&#8217;s been a long time since I got into the flow while reading a book, but this book did it for me. Written as a socratic dialogue &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/caelifera\/2017\/02\/05\/book-proofs-and-refutations-the-logic-of-mathematical-discovery\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Book: Proofs and Refutations, The Logic of Mathematical Discovery&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/caelifera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/caelifera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/caelifera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/caelifera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/caelifera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/caelifera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/caelifera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/caelifera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/caelifera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}