Posted on 04/13/2017 8:32:13 AM PDT by BenLurkin
The original "Star Trek" series isn't just a milestone of science fiction, it's also a treasure trove of mathematical ideas as Space.com discovered when we attended "Star Trek: The Math of Khan" at the Museum of Mathematics on Thursday (April 6).
...
Captain Kirk talks computers to death no fewer than four separate occasions in the original series. The captain often achieves this feat using sentences similar to the "Liar's Paradox": "This sentence is false." It's a paradox because if the sentence is false, then the sentence is stating the truth, even though it is supposed to be false; if the sentence is true, then it must be true that the sentence is false.
A similar statement powers mathematician Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which in effect proves there's a similarly paradoxical statement like "This statement is not provable" in any given mathematical system, Grime said. If the statement is true, it means there are true mathematical statements that can never be proved, like "holes" in mathematics. If the statement is false, its a contradiction, and that means there are contradictions within a mathematical system so any system without any contradictions will also have statements that are impossible to prove. So something very much like Kirk's computer-busting paradox is something that appears in real mathematics.
...Alan Turing set out to find out whether it's possible to determine whether any given computer program will be able to solve a problem and halt or get stuck working on the problem forever. Ultimately, he proved that you cannot write another program to predict whether a program will finish or not a result that suggests that you can't definitively determine whether a statement will ever be possible to prove, Grime said.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
She was bat girl and died last year. Cat woman (Julie Newmar)still lives. Childhood fantasies.
I was in my 30s then and still had 'em. Sigh. :-)
I generally do not prefer blondes but whew! Love the roman slave woman, yum-yum!!!
Google some of the bikini modeling photos Yvonne Craig shot in the 60’s. Krikey!!
In other words: Richard Sharpe was so awesome, he survived being played by SEAN BEAN.
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