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from Part One - Building up to Categories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 October 2022
Introduction to the idea that math is all relative to context, as things behave differently in different contexts. This chapter has a little more formality. We begin by discussing the myth that math is rigid and fixed, and introduce the idea that, on the contrary, it is contextual, and has great flexibility coming from the ability to move between different contexts. As an example, we look at the taxi-cab metric and examine what circles are in this context, and what ? (“pi”) is, where ? is defined as the ratio between the circumference and diameter of any circle. We then look at some different contexts in which 1 + 1 can be considered to be something other than 2, including the “n-hour clocks”, that is, arithmetic modulo n, and the zero world in which everything is zero. This is to open our thinking to the idea that different things can be true in different contexts.
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