Professor Ian Stewart

Today I was fortunate enough to meet a very bright mathematics professor and author (name above). I've listened to many of his contribiutions on Melvyn Bragg's "In Our Time" BBC Radio 4 programme. There is a brief resume of him at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stewart_(mathematician)

We invited him to speak at a conference and (for a modest appearance fee) he presented on "How mathematics has influenced computing".

He did a superb pitch, but the best thing was that I managed to get talking to him at lunchtime, he gave me 40 minutes of his time and we spoke about many things.

I opened with my time traveller experiment of trying to get the answer to RSA 2048. He thought that it was an excellent experiment but took it one stage further than I had, he said that the experiment was logically consistent and that it didn't even need the time traveller to know the answer to RSA 2048 as he could have got the answer from my sheet of paper. This kind of did my head in.

I asked him his thoughts on John Bell's 1970's experiment showing quantum entaglement and if he thought that it meant that communication could be transmitted at faster than light speeds. His answer (which he suspected was the way things are but could not prove was fascinating). He believes that particles may well contain hidden variables, so things are programmed to be in a certain state if you measure them at a particular time. I understood what he meant, and said "wow, it's like the universe is some shadow of what is really there" and he said "Yes!" and it was very exciting to meet someone that I could talk to at this level.

We were widebanding information (I think!) so I pushed my luck.

I asked if truth were really possible outside of the axiomatic system such as mathematics - he didn't really give me answer but talked about Gödel's Theorem of incpompleteness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorem

which fortunately I had been boning up on in Fishkill last month, and I threw in "so that's why he committed suicide" to Prof Ian's answer, which was well received :-)

During the presentation he had talked about a set of (binomial) problems that may (or may not be) be solvable. I wanted to know his religious views so I prefixed my question with "I don't want to upset your religion in any way and I know that Hawking does not answer "God" questions so please feel free to ignore me .." and then " .. but if this set of problems are proved to be unsolvable could God solve them?"

And the answer he gave is that if there is an omnipotent diety then by defintion it is outside of the axioms of mathematics so is not subject to the same restrictions. And a Distinguished Engineer, who had been intently listening to the conversation (but had not contributed much as I don't think that he was familiar with what we were talking about) said "and that is how it should be". The DE's a Christian, and I believe that he is correct.

In fact the two people with me when talking to the Prof hardly said a word while the Prof and I were at it, for 40 mins. And between these two IBM people they have 18 + 27? = 45 patents. That made me think that one day I could get a patent. Maybe I'm not so dumb. Or maybe you don't need to be so smart to get a patent?

The Prof did share that he was not religious, which I found a little surprising I guess.

If my daughter ever reads this: go out and find these like minds Katherine, it will make your day. We can do it.

I just documented all that for posterity! Have a great weekend!