“What do I love when I love my God?”

The last two interview questions posed to John D. Caputo, a professor of religion and humanities at Syracuse University. The interview was conducted via e-mail, by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and published by the New York Times.

G.G.: "If Derrida doubts or denies that there’s someone who guarantees such things, isn’t it only honest to say that he is an agnostic or an atheist? For most people, God is precisely the one who guarantees that the things we most fear won’t happen. You’ve mentioned Derrida’s interest in Augustine. Wouldn’t Augustine — and virtually all the Christian tradition — denounce any suggestion that God’s promises might not be utterly reliable?"

J.C.: "Maybe it disturbs what “most people” think religion is — assuming they are thinking about it — but maybe a lot of these people wake up in the middle of the night feeling the same disturbance, disturbed by a more religionless religion going on in the religion meant to give them comfort. Even for people who are content with the contents of the traditions they inherit, deconstruction is a life-giving force, forcing them to reinvent what has been inherited and to give it a future. But religion for Derrida is not a way to link up with saving supernatural powers; it is a mode of being-in-the-world, of being faithful to the promise of the world."

"The comparison with Augustine is telling. Unlike Augustine, he does not think a thing has to last forever to be worthy of our unconditional love. Still, he says he has been asking himself all his life Augustine’s question, “What do I love when I love my God?” But where Augustine thinks that there is a supernaturally revealed answer to this question, Derrida does not. He describes himself as a man of prayer, but where Augustine thinks he knows to whom he is praying, Derrida does not. When I asked him this question once he responded, “If I knew that, I would know everything” — he would be omniscient, God!"

"This not-knowing does not defeat his religion or his prayer. It is constitutive of them, constituting a faith that cannot be kept safe from doubt, a hope that cannot be kept safe from despair. We live in the distance between these pairs."

G.G.: "But if deconstruction leads us to give up Augustine’s way of thinking about God and even his belief in revealed truth, shouldn’t we admit that it has seriously watered down the content of Christianity, reduced the distance between it and agnosticism or atheism? Faith that is not confident and hope that is not sure are not what the martyrs died for."

J.C.: "In this view, what martyrs die for is an underlying faith, which is why, by an accident of birth or a conversion, they could have been martyrs for the other side. Mother Teresa expressed some doubts about her beliefs, but not about an underlying faith in her work. Deconstruction is a plea to rethink what we mean by religion and to locate a more unnerving religion going on in our more comforting religion."

"Deconstruction is faith and hope. In what? In the promises that are harbored in inherited names like “justice” and “democracy” — or “God.” Human history is full of such names and they all have their martyrs. That is why the difference between Derrida and Augustine cannot be squashed into the distinction between “theism” and “atheism” or — deciding to call it a draw — “agnosticism.” It operates on a fundamentally different level. Deconstruction dares to think “religion” in a new way, in what Derrida calls a “new Enlightenment,” daring to rethink what the Enlightenment boxed off as “faith” and “reason.”"

"But deconstruction is not destruction. After all, the bottom line of deconstruction, “yes, come,” is pretty much the last line of the New Testament: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”"

Scientific American: "Equations Are Art inside a Mathematician’s Brain"

"When mathematicians describe equations as beautiful, they are not lying. Brain scans show that their minds respond to beautiful equations in the same way other people respond to great paintings or masterful music. The finding could bring neuroscientists closer to understanding the neural basis of beauty, a concept that is surprisingly hard to define."

In the study, researchers led by Semir Zeki of University College London asked 16 mathematicians to rate 60 equations on a scale ranging from "ugly" to "beautiful." Two weeks later, the mathematicians viewed the same equations and rated them again while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex.

Skipping down to the last three paragraphs...

The study found, for example, that the beauty of equations is not entirely subjective. Most of the mathematicians agreed on which equations were beautiful and which were ugly, with Euler's identity, 1+eiπ=0, consistently rated the most attractive equation in the lot. "Here are these three fundamental numbers, e, pi and i," Adams says, "all defined independently and all critically important in their own way, and suddenly you have this relationship between them encompassed in this equation that has a grand total of seven symbols in it? It is dumbfounding."

On the bottom of the heap, mathematicians consistently rated Srinivasa Ramanujan's infinite series for 1/π most ugly.

"It doesn't sing," Adams says. "I look at it, and I don't learn anything new about pi. And those numbers, 26,390? 9801? As far as I am concerned, you could switch in other numbers, and I couldn't tell the difference."

Scientific American

"Math Explains Likely Long Shots, Miracles and Winning the Lottery [Excerpt]"

I'm only including the birthday problem here. For the seemingly long shot, like the lotteries, click here.

The birthday problem poses the following question: How many people must be in a room to make it more likely than not that two of them share the same birthday?

The answer is just 23. If there are 23 or more people in the room, then it's more likely than not that two will have the same birthday.

Now, if you haven't encountered the birthday problem before, this might strike you as surprising. Twenty-three might sound far too small a number. Perhaps you reasoned as follows: There's only a one-in-365 chance that any particular other person will have the same birthday as me. So there's a 364/365 chance that any particular person will have a different birthday from me. If there are n people in the room, with each of the other n − 1 having a probability of 364/365 of having a different birthday from me, then the probability that all n − 1 have a different birthday from me is 364/365 × 364/365 × 364/365 × 364/365 … × 364/365, with 364/365 multiplied together n − 1 times. If n is 23, this is 0.94.

Because that's the probability that none of them share my birthday, the probability that at least one of them has the same birthday as me is just 1 − 0.94. (This follows by reasoning that either someone has the same birthday as me or that no one has the same birthday as me, so the probabilities of these two events must add up to 1.) Now, 1 − 0.94 = 0.06. That's very small.

Yet this is the wrong calculation to consider because that probability—the probability that someone has the same birthday as you—is not what the question asked. It asked about the probability that any two people in the same room have the same birthday as each other. This includes the probability that one of the others has the same birthday as you, which is what I calculated above, but it also includes the probability that two or more of the other people share the same birthday, different from yours.

This is where the combinations kick in. Whereas there are only n − 1 people who might share the same birthday as you, there are a total of n × (n − 1)/2 pairs of people in the room. This number of pairs grows rapidly as n gets larger. When n equals 23, it's 253, which is more than 10 times as large as n − 1 = 22. That is, if there are 23 people in the room, there are 253 possible pairs of people but only 22 pairs that include you.

So let's look at the probability that none of the 23 people in the room share the same birthday. For two people, the probability that the second person doesn't have the same birthday as the first is 364/365. Then the probability that those two are different and that a third doesn't share the same birthday as either of them is 364/365 × 363/365. Likewise, the probability that those three have different birthdays and that the fourth does not share the same birthday as any of those first three is 364/365 × 363/365 × 362/365. Continuing like this, the probability that none of the 23 people share the same birthday is 364/365 × 363/365 × 362/365 × 361/365 … × 343/365.

This equals 0.49. Because the probability that none of the 23 people share the same birthday is 0.49, the probability that some of them share the same birthday is just 1 − 0.49, or 0.51, which is greater than half.

Scientific American via Instapundit