Re: Ontolog Forum • Paola Di Maio

Partly this discussion and partly just the mood I’m in brought to mind a motley assortment of old reminiscences.  My first years in college I oscillated (or vacillated) between math and physics, eventually returning to grad school in math, but only after a decade of cycling through majors from communications — of which I recall only a course in Aristotle — to psychology to philosophy to a “radical-liberal arts college” where I got to craft my own Bachelor’s degree in Mathematical and Philosophical Method.

But I’m getting ahead of the story.  The course in physics took off with a bang right away, moving quickly from classical to relativity to quantum physics.  My professors often took a Read the Masters! approach, giving us readings in Bohr, Dirac, Feynman, Heisenberg, and others, in addition to our regular textbooks.  Among the forces that drove me back to math, I remember Dirac’s algebraic symbolism, Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics, and above all Peirce, especially his use of logical matrices, that made me realize I needed to learn a lot more math before I could comprehend what any of them were talking about.

To be continued …

cc: Ontolog Forum (1) (2) • Structural Modeling • Systems Science