Friday, March 3, 2023

3 March 23

The assortment of jockey silks on this tie gives me the opportunity to talk about set theory, on the birthday of Georg Cantor (1845-1918), the creator of set theory (in mathematics and philosophy). Among the set of people born on 3 March, he is the member who first defined what it means to be a member of a set and the relations of unions and intersections. More mundanely, my tie shows the union of four sets of silks -- the purples, the yellows, the reds and the blues. Looking at the recurring sequence of colors might get us into the technical topics of partial and total ordered sets, but I'm going to stop and just enjoy the tie. (On my companion bow tie you can see the sets of similarly-colored blinkers, but the color order is different.)


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