Sunday surprise: mathematical religion

November 8th, 2015 by Charles Cameron

[ by Charles Cameron — divine geometry in Japan ]

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The sacred nature of number should not surprise us, though it often does. Here is the Neoplatonist Proclus, as quoted in Dantzig, Number: the Language of Science, p.78:

It is told that those who first brought out the irrationals from concealment into the open perished in shipwreck, to a man. For the unutterable and the formless must needs be concealed. And those who uncovered and touched this image of life were instantly destroyed and shall remain forever exposed to the play of the eternal waves.

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Here are two offerings from a Buddhist shrine in Japan:

Japanese Buddhist Offering 19.50

and

Japanese Buddhist Offering 19.47

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I found them in this delightful account of the Soroban or Japanese abacus:

The section on mathematical offerings begins around the 19.40 mark and goes to 20.18 — but the whole video is worth your attention.

Posted in Charles Cameron, japan, mathematics, sacred, Uncategorized | 2 comments

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  1. Dreamtimer:

    November 9th, 2015 at 7:47 pm

    At least the Pythagoreans had a falsifiable ideology, which seems to be rare. Their will to conceal a fundamental bug in their framework is both hilarious and humane and an eternal warning sign for those who fall too much in love with the beauty-of-X ( X = theory, physics, elegant universe, a certain type of geometry etc. ).
    .
    Lately a metaphysics of freedom used Cantor’s diagonal argument in set theory as a witness. Instead of being horrified by the formless absolute, interminability and contingency open the possibility for human ( and divine? ) creativity. It’s basically a way of saying: the universe is a weird, irrational and chaotic place? Enjoy it and make the best of it!

  2. Grurray:

    November 12th, 2015 at 5:28 pm

    After reading about it for a long time, I’ve come to the conclusion that the story of Hippasus of Metapontum getting thrown overboard may have been an attempt by the Neoplatonists to slur Pythagoras and Neo-Pythagoreanism, which they were just superseding at the time of their emergence, in order to purge any monotheistic spirituality, or at least the notion of a loving Creator instead of a Gnostic Clockwinder, and certainly discredit mystical rituals.
    Rhema over logos.
    Pythagoras wasn’t a classical period Jim Jones, but the founder of an ascetic movement focused on healing and living in harmony with the world.
    He may also have been the founder the Essenes, the mystical Jewish sect that Jesus was probably a member of. Neoplatonists, on the other hand, hated Christians.
    Pythagoras actually lived and taught in exile because his beliefs weren’t tolerated in Greece. Pythagoreans themselves were persecuted, so it doesn’t make sense that they would persecute one of their own over this matter. Numbers, albeit important, were only a part of their overall philosophy. They also believed in meditation and personal interaction with a divine reality. It isn’t plausible to me that their philosophy couldn’t accept irrational numbers.