G. Spencer-Brown

George Spencer -Brown, George Spencer Brown ( pseudonyms James Keys, Richard Leroy, born April 2, 1923 in Grimsby, Lincolnshire ) is a British mathematician, psychologist, poet and songwriter.

Biography

Spencer -Brown studied at the University of London and the London Hospital Medical College from 1940 to 1943 From 1943 to 1947 he was in the Royal Navy. ( Radio operator, communication engineers, Hypno- therapist pain; Lieutenant 1946).

In 1947 he began studies at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He left Cambridge in 1952 to continue his studies at Oxford, where he was also a research associate until 1958. In 1957, he published his doctoral dissertation on the theory of probability entitled Probability and Scientific Inference. Supervisor of the thesis was the British logician William Kneale.

Since 1960, Spencer -Brown was with Bertrand Russell in contact. In the 1960s he worked as an engineer for the British railway. There was a multi-year collaboration with the psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing in the fields of psychotherapy and parenting.

In 1976 he was Visiting Professor of Mathematics at the University of Western Australia, 1977 for computer science at Stanford University, 1980-81 for pure mathematics at the University of Maryland. His lectures dealt with the four-color problem in maps and the Formal Arithmetics of Second Order. Spencer Brown was also a military advisor in Washington, DC for codes, code - decryption and optics.

He put his 1977 treatise ago, in which he attempts to prove the four color theorem. This "evidence" is so far not accepted by the professional community or been recognized only as debatable contribution. In 2006, Spencer Brown continued to publish a proof sketch, with which he claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis in fundamentals. In addition, Spencer Brown also insured, only with the adoption of imaginary truth values ​​, as provided in his calculations, the Goldbach's conjecture and Fermat's Last Theorem could be proved. All these allegations have led to Spencer Brown is not taken seriously as a mathematician, especially as the four-color problem and Fermat's last theorem have since been also proved without Spencer Brown's calculus.

Spencer -Brown was during his student days at Cambridge, a Half- Blue in chess (ie, an excellent chess player at the University competition ), also held two world records in gliding and was a sports correspondent for the Daily Express.

Laws of Form

His main work, the Laws of Form. ( German: Laws of form) from the year 1969, it deals with classical problems of logic in a non-standard approach today. The special is that Spencer Brown only uses two different characters for his "Laws": On the one hand the well-known equal sign, on the other hand a kind of negation or delimitation operator. The book is controversial among experts: some consider it to be awesome, other than appear original, but from the knowledge value banal, because it merely constitutes an operational reformulation of propositional logic: in fact the calculus - apart from the different spelling of the two characters - identical to the entitative Graphs of Charles S. Peirce, a preform his Existential Graphs of the 19th century. The Laws of Form have influenced and shaped the thinking of scientists, among others, Heinz von Foerster, Louis Kauffman, Niklas Luhmann, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.

Form

Spencer -Brown defines the English term "form" as a unit from a surrounding distinction with its interior and exterior. Using such a distinction can then rename only the inside, the outside and the distinction itself remain unnamed.

Unmarked Space

Spencer -Brown describes the Laws of Form and the observer dilemma: Any action taken by an observer watching, thus distinction, therefore, implies a second distinction. The first is the distinction of each observed object - the second is the implicit underlying distinction, what is observed and what is not - the latter he calls unmarked space.

Such observation of the observation is also called re-entry and is universally recognized as theory figure on the mathematics beyond use. It is at about the sociologist Niklas Luhmann as re-entry into the distinction to a central figure of the theory luhmann between systems theory.

  • See also: Laws of Form # Unmarked Space

Love Letters

Two years later, Spencer -Brown wrote under the pseudonym James Keys Only two can play this game ( German: This game is only for two ). In contrast to the " laws of form " is this is a book about love. He wrote it after a broken love affair with a young student. It is almost a third of an open love letter from twelve poems and stories to the former girlfriend. Brown himself says about the book: "In the laws of the form I have tried, as far as I was able to describe the male side of things, just as I try in this book, as far as my limited skills allow something about the feminine side to say. "

Quotes

  • " A statement can be not only true, false or meaningless, but also imaginary. " (In: Laws of Form )
  • "There is a game that children play, when the tide comes. They build around themselves a supposedly impenetrable sand wall to keep the water as long as possible outside. Of course, the water seeps from the bottom through and eventually it breaks through the wall and flooded all. Adults play a similar game. They surround themselves with a seemingly impenetrable wall of arguments to keep the reality out there. But the reality seeps from below through breaks through at some point the wall and flooded all of us " (From: Only two can play this game ).
  • "It is a sign of our culture colossal preference for the male principle, that we think we can invalidate any serious piece of literature, by refuting it with arguments. "

Writings

  • Laws of Form - laws of the form. Bohmeier, Lübeck 1997, ISBN 3-89094-321-7
  • Probability and science. 1996, ISBN 3-927809-42- X ( the second edition of this title was published in 2008 )
  • This game just goes to second ( "Only Two Can Play This Game" ). Bohmeier 1994, ISBN 3-89094-288-1
  • A Lion's Teeth / dandelions. Bohmeier, ISBN 3-89094-287-3
  • Autobiography - Volume 1 Infancy and childhood ( English ). Bohmeier, Lübeck 2004, ISBN 3-89094-355-1
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