And we also like words as well as numbers:

http://irenebrination.typepad.com/files/calvino-italo-cosmicomics.pdf

A marvellous little book that one. Probably best enjoyed as a book and not a pdf file.

David f, proper bible study does look at the context. And if the objective is to make it conform to whatever the sect of the person conducting the study maintains is truth, will nerds really comply? I'd expect them to be willing to dissent.

I think whether nerds like bible study depends primarily on whether they're Christian nerds (in which case they will), atheist nerds (in which case they probably won't), agnostic nerds or something else.

Anyway, thanks for the number theory link.

Dear Aidan,

Unfortunately the reality is that what you call proper Bible study is not what is generally Bible study.

Dear Craig and Toni,

Thank you. I have three of Knuth's books and am delighted to hear about surreal numbers.

http://www.penguin.com/read/book-clubs/the-mathematicians-shiva/9780143126317 is a novel based on the death of a woman who may have discovered the solution to the Navier-Stokes equation and the attempts of those who have descended on the area after her death trying to find out about it. Funny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s tells about Paul Erdos who devoted his life to mathematics: “His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems",[15] and Erdos drank copious quantities. (This quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdos,[16] but Erdos himself ascribed it to Rényi.[17]) After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[18] Erdos won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence, mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use.”

I had dinner one night with him and others, and he amused us by pronouncing the menu items as though the words were Hungarian.

When my oldest son was six he said, "Daddy, no matter how high I count there is always a bigger number. Is there a biggest number." I had hish hopes for, but he became a professor of anthropology.

Books with mathematical problems:

Recreations in the Theory of Numbers – The Queen of Mathematics entertains by Albert Beiler. A Dover book and possibly out of publication. George Polya’s 2 volumes “Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning” has problems in many areas of mathematics.
Minds that can bring seminal ideas to mathematics are rare, but I’m sure many people on olo can read and enjoy the above along with doing some of the problems. Mathematics is often taught as though numeration is all there is to it. Mathematics is joyous, non-polluting, cheap and makes nobody pregnant

David, thank you for those links. Erdos is one of my own favourite characters in science and mathematics, although unlike you I was never fortunate enough to meet him. What is your Erdos number? Presumably if you were close enough to him to have had dinner together then it must be 1, or at least 2?

I must try his recipe for stimulating creative thought...

I'll look up your links with pleasure once my exams are over for the semester. Funnily enough, one of my topics this semester has been fluid mechanics, which is of course the domain of Navier-Stokes work, although Stokes extended the work far more generally to include work within vector fields of all kinds.

On the subject of viscous fluids, you might enjoy this story on some work that's being done to finally narrow down one of the oldest undefined physical constants in science - the Reynold's number at which flow transitions from laminar to turbulent - and is also opening up a lot of new questions.

http://nautil.us/issue/25/water/to-predict-turbulence-just-count-the-puffs-rp

david f, thinking about it a bit more, your earlier description of bible study sounds like what the JWs do. Were they involved with your experience of it?

And if not, what prevented you from dissenting?