LMS Popular Lecture Series 2010, Clutching at Random Straws, Matt Parker
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Channel: London Mathematical Society
Views: 187,466
Rating: 4.9522591 out of 5
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Length: 63min 7sec (3787 seconds)
Published: Thu Apr 24 2014
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That submission title reminds me of a line from the film The Man Who Knew Infinity.
"We [mathematicians] are merely explorers of infinity."
In a sense mathematicians explore an infinite domain in search of patterns, being infinite it's easy to find a lot of tantalizing patterns which when subjected to the rigors of mathematics end up being flawed.
A similar thing happens in science, a theory seems to offer promising results. The difference between a scientist and a pseudoscientist is that when the theory breaks down, the scientist will abandon it, while the pseudoscientist will ignore contradictory evidence or more reasonable explanations.