Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich & other examples of P.N.T.

by Tentatively, A Convenience

WARNING: ANY EBOOK DOWNLOAD VERSION OF THIS OFFERED ONLINE IS A PHISHING SCAM.

A math/humor/'pataphysics/philosophy book divided into 3 parts.

The 1st part is a combination review / spin-off of 10 math books read by the author. These 10 books were chosen as lay-level introductions to ideas that tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE considers to be "paradigm shifting": ideas such as "zero", "imaginary numbers", & "transcendental numbers".

The 2nd part deals with 7 main math-related projects of the authors dating from sometime between 1973 & 1977 ("Number Writing") to 2005 ("Haircut Paradox").

Part 3 is an exhaustive 94pp section of 3 glossaries, works cited, & an index.

The overall thrust of the book is an examination of the generation of paradigm shifts thru mathematics as an outlaw activity of heretics.

408 pages

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Thanks to the idiocy of Goodreads policy my books are no longer easily found & do not all appear here. Instead, 5 of them appear under "Tentatively a Convenience": https://www.goodreads.com/author/show... .

My name is "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE". It is NOT "Tentatively, A Convenience". The completely disrespectful push for conformity is on. Such 'normalization' of my spelling, wch I've been using since 1979, is a symptom of what I call "AU", Artificial Unintelligence - both that of algorithms wch can't possibly cope w/ the human imagination & that of robopathic humans - say the type of person who studied creative writing w/ a professor who isn't a creative writer & who isn't published. This type of person then proceeds to learn 'how to be creative' in a completely uncreative way & goes on to not be a creative writer or to be published either but to still be convinced that they're qualified to edit actual published actual creative writers. That's a form of regrettably delusional behavior fostered in them by their inability to educate themselves outside of potty training.

Alas, some GoodReads fiend has removed my date of death! I had it as "September 3, 1953" - before my date of birth so that my death won't happen in my lifetime. Some humorless GR person must want me to die. Foo on them.

Making matters even worse, my bk "footnotes" has been removed from the database here & I'm now listed as the author of "15" bks instead of the correct SIXTEEN. "footnotes" was still for sale online the last time I checked so I highly recommend getting a copy before they disappear altogether.

OTHERWISE, please read this extensive interview w/ me by poet/essayist Alan Davies as part of "Otoliths 27" ( http://the-otolith.blogspot.com.au/20... ). It's a DOOZY, I promise. It'll also hopefully be published as a small & cheap bk by Six Gallery Press in early, 2013 - uh, make that possibly w/in my lifetime - uh, make that NEVER by 6GP.

ALSO, my friend Anthony Levin-Decanini has started an excellent new (as of mid 2013) improvising series called "Crucible Sound" in Pittsburgh at Modernformations Gallery & I was honored by his interviewing me regarding improv for his relevant blog. I quite like the interview & I hope you do too. Here's the link for part 1:

http://cruciblesound.blogspot.com/201...

& the link for part 2:

http://cruciblesound.blogspot.com/201...

I hope you find it interesting enuf to subscribe to the blog & to check out the other programs. If you're in or nearby Pittsburgh, PLEASE ATTEND THE CRUCIBLE SOUNDS! Things like this don't last forever, but while they do they can be quite lively!!

The photo of me is by my friend Julie Gonzalez. Maybe someday I'll write a bio in here but, in the meantime, I'll just sign w/ some of my email signature:

electronically signed,

He-Who-Has-Written

Amir-ul Kafirs

Some tenuous beginnings of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory):
(for all x)x = (for all x)x (Anything is Anything)
(A Double Negative As Not A Positive)
(A finite quantity represented as a set containing
an infinite quantity of its subdivisions
(such as its subdivision in terms of rational numbers)
does not equal the same finite quantity
represented as a set containing an infinite quantity
OF A DIFFERENT DEGREE of its subdivisions
(such as its subdivision in terms of irrational numbers).)
m + n does not equal n + m is isomorphic to x
the ceiling of x is greater than or equal to the ceiling of the ceiling of x
(Enough is Enough)
The Formula o

Reviews

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

Given that this is my bk, this is more of a promotional statement than a review.

The 1st paragraph reads:

"When I was a child, I was a very good mathematician. I was also good at drawing. I remember thinking, when I was 9 yrs old, something to the effect that a mathematician's life was probably too socially isolated & not much fun & I decided that, therefore, it might be better for me to be an artist."

40 yrs passed & while I still played w/ the math that most interested me, such as set theory & imaginary numbers, my math skills largely waned. Then, in 2003, at age 49, I decided to read Simon Singh's bk "Fermat's Enigma" as an experiment in determining what was left of my ability to understand math. That lead to reading more math bks aimed at lay readers.

5 yrs later I thought I might as well try to WRITE a math bk - as an experiment to see if I cd actually do it. I envisioned it as around 160pp. 6 wks later, it was done - 408pp! I was very, very pleased. In some sense, this bk became my most articulated philosophical statement.

The next step was to send out the ms to 2 friends, poet/scholar Bruce Stater & musician/conceptualist 'Charles Boyd' (aka John Berndt), for them to add MARGINALIA to it. It was a part of my design plan to have the marginalia be referred to in the original text & for the 'marginalia' to be printed in the original bk - thusly possibly making this one of the 1st & only bks to be so designed.

The basic idea of the bk is that certain concepts create PARADIGM SHIFTS - thusly getting away from (somewhat) the notion that only technology (such as the printing press & the telescope) produce paradigm shifts. Various turning point mathematical concepts are then explored as examples of this.

The cover of the bk shows a knuckle tattoo that I have that consists of the following variation on a famous equation of Leonard Euler's (expressed here in so-called 'natural language'):

e to the power of pi times i + one to the power of infinity is approximately equal to zero.

"e" & "pi" are both transcendental numbers that serve as constants.

"i" is the symbol for "imaginary numbers" generally represented as the square root of negative one.

The whole shebang is meant to be representative of multiple paradigm shift concepts culminating in an indeterminate form. A "knuckle sandwich" is a punch. I like to think of this knuckle tattoo as a symbol for the punches to worldviews that concepts like "infinity" have brought w/ them.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, I highly recommend this book. It is a book about mathematics, but perhaps not like any other you are likely to read on the subject. Second, this book is not for everyone. Personally, I don’t waste my time on books that have “something for everyone” because that usually means they don’t have any real substance. This book has plenty of substance, but requires curiosity, open-mindedness, and an appreciation of a highly intelligent, ironic, absurdist sense of humor. You don’t have to be a mathematician, but you do need to think that math is interesting. If this is you, then I suggest giving this a thorough read.

The author of this book is not a professional or even amateur mathematician, but rather an intensely creative person with a good deal of natural but untrained mathematical ability. They have produced a large body of highly idiosyncratic, playful, and often deeply intellectual creative work as a musician, filmmaker, writer, and performer. In this book, the author applies their unique approach to the understanding and interpretation of various aspects of pure mathematics, and number theory in particular. They execute this process through reading and review of eight books on popular mathematics, including the notoriously obtuse Gödel, Escher, Bach, biographies of famous mathematicians such as Alan Turing and John Nash, and books on the history and development of the numbers e, pi, and zero. In addition, the author brings their full creative process to bear on the interpretation of these texts, which results not only in playful adaptations and applications of the material but also in extensions of these concepts in new directions. In this regard, the author works in the spirit of the great artist Alfred Jarry, who engaged in a similar approach to modern science that turned physics and metaphysics on their heads, creating his own ‘philosophy’ of science that extended these fields in absurd, playful, and perceptive directions.

Even though the subject of this book is mathematics, it involves much, much more, including “the history, the politics, the apparent paradoxes, the etymology, the anti-religion, the philosophy, [and] the biography.” It accomplishes this through the author’s extensive “digressions, tangents, extrapolations, absurd fantasies, [and] convoluted explorations.” These include insightful, convoluted, funny, and sometimes bizarre permutations of text, symbols, and images. In addition, various dialogues between the author and his associates serve as commentary and further exploration and expansion of the mathematical concepts. There is even documentation of a film based on creative interpretations and permutations of them. And finally, an extensive glossary manages to tie this all together.

While this mix of elements may seem confusing to some, particularly for an already obtuse subject matter, the author’s sense of humor greatly lightens these explorations. Though he is serious about his work, he does not take himself or his subject so seriously that he cannot poke fun at both. He develops extensive running inside jokes that he lets the reader in on that make it fun to read. And despite the many digressions, he always brings the reader back to the punchline. This makes it a good read for those who might otherwise be intimidated by number theory.

The abstract nature of number theory proves fertile ground for a subversive playfulness designed to undermine what the author calls ‘reality maintenance traps’ (see below) through the creation of his own Perverse Number Theory (P.N.T.). Number theory already presents us with mind-bending abstract concepts and unusual implications, and the author takes these and runs with them, bending the reader’s mind even further through a process that is very clever, sometimes convoluted, and often funny. In P.N.T., topics in mathematics such as indeterminant forms, imaginary numbers, infinity, infinitesimals, zero and the empty set, and transcendental numbers get treated to a retooling and reformulation that “point[s] to a flexible ‘reality’… that evades definition by its very nature.”

Reality maintenance traps, as I understand them, are ideas, constructs, and notions we have about the world that operate to limit our thinking about and being in it. Ultimately, they constrain our behavior by limiting what we imagine to be possible. We take them as truth but they are, in fact, the result of social consensus and are absorbed and internalized from the dominant culture. The author develops P.N.T as a kind of antidote to this restrictive normality in an attempt to break its hold on our thinking. It takes aim at the repressive and oppressive aspects of what we take for granted. P.N.T requires the reader to wrestle with concepts outside of the range normally encountered. Thus, the author states that “whatever is NON-AXIOMATIC can be embraced as liberatory.” In considering neural processing from an information theory standpoint, they ask “if we are soft machines channeling neurons thru gates of interpretation in order to generate ‘true meanings’, can we increase & control the number of gate ambiguities to choose ‘reality’-manifested outcomes?” The author proposes “ ‘changing the way one thinks’ at a more basic system level [than, for example, by so-called “thinking outside of the box”] by changing the units w/ wch we think.” Thus, P.N.T takes the reader into areas of philosophy and ontology that are fascinating and often unanticipated and surprising. Though challenging, this is an enjoyable mix.

A final aspect of the book that I appreciate is that, ultimately, it is a participatory experience.
What you gain from this book and from P.N.T is largely determined by how you engage with it. It operates on many levels and can be approached in different ways depending on what you bring to the experience: as a good introduction to higher mathematics from a non-expert, as a creative exploration from a decidedly outsider perspective, as an thought-provoking, entertaining, and challenging new way to approach “accepted” notions not only of math, but of reality itself. Perhaps one of its most successful aspects is that these different approaches and levels are intertwined and operate simultaneously.