The Truth of Being Limited

The last episode of the installment The Story of Maths: To Infinity and Beyond, Marcus du Sautoy examined twenty-three unsolved problems of mathematics as posed by David Hilbert at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris on year the 1900.

Du Sautoy explored the ideas of many great mathematicians about infinity especially those of Georg Cantor and Henri Poincaré.

According to Cantor, there are different infinities, some bigger than the others. He was also the proponent of the Continuum Hypothesis –which Hilbert listed as the first problem of the 23 great unsolved problems of mathematics.

Henri Poincaré worked on about ‘bendy geometry’ and left a problem he could not solve regarding the shapes that could be made possible for a 3D universe. This was solved in 2002 by Grigori Perelman whose identity is concealed from the public.

Du Sautoy looked at the discoveries of the American mathematician Paul Cohen, the work of André Weil on algebraic geometry (which helped solve Fermat’s Last Theorem) and on the contributions of Alexander Grothendieck. On the last part of the documentary, all the other great unsolved problems of mathematics today.

But what I like best was the part about Kurt Gödel. He showed that mathematics could not prove its own consistency or that the unknown could never be separated from mathematics. This just tells us that even in mathematics there are things that are true but there is incapability of proving it.

I honor this statement because I do believe that there are things which are far from our reach to prove. That even the lack of proof can’t defeat the truth –like the existence of the Higher Being.