Presentation Type
Presentation
Department
Mathematics
Description
I gained an interest in paradoxes when I was introduced to the Grandfather paradox as a child, and began studying time travel, along with all the effects and thought experiments it could lead to. This, in turn, led to my researching many more paradoxes and having something to do in my free time that didn’t require anything outside my own thoughts. Several paradoxes I found stumped me then, and still do to this day. However, there are some that I have recently begun to feel like I am understanding much more clearly. One day this past semester, I was thinking through the Arrow Paradox again, as I often do, and an idea popped into my head. I’ll explain it later in my presentation, but the answer came to me because of the concepts we had been working on in the Cal I class I had been working in as a TA. When this thought came to me, I began seeing what I could figure out about other paradoxes using the same mathematical approaches, and what I found was interesting. While I had spent years just trying to think through them sequentially and logically, the way to understand them was not through either of these. Working through the sequences and logic given would of course just lead you to the paradoxical contradiction, and you would never get anywhere. You had to take a different approach, and the one that I found worked was by looking at the contradictions through a mathematical lens.
Included in
A Paradox Solved (Or 3)
I gained an interest in paradoxes when I was introduced to the Grandfather paradox as a child, and began studying time travel, along with all the effects and thought experiments it could lead to. This, in turn, led to my researching many more paradoxes and having something to do in my free time that didn’t require anything outside my own thoughts. Several paradoxes I found stumped me then, and still do to this day. However, there are some that I have recently begun to feel like I am understanding much more clearly. One day this past semester, I was thinking through the Arrow Paradox again, as I often do, and an idea popped into my head. I’ll explain it later in my presentation, but the answer came to me because of the concepts we had been working on in the Cal I class I had been working in as a TA. When this thought came to me, I began seeing what I could figure out about other paradoxes using the same mathematical approaches, and what I found was interesting. While I had spent years just trying to think through them sequentially and logically, the way to understand them was not through either of these. Working through the sequences and logic given would of course just lead you to the paradoxical contradiction, and you would never get anywhere. You had to take a different approach, and the one that I found worked was by looking at the contradictions through a mathematical lens.