Monday, May 19, 2014

Steampunk Math Geeks

Steampunk is growing in popularity right now. However, there are far too few steampunk fans who also play table-top RPG's. There are also too few steampunk fans who are simultaneously math geeks. This needs to be fixed. After all, the development of modern logical math is one of the key themes of steampunk.

Bertrand Russell, Georg Cantor, Alfred Whitehead, Henri Poincare, Gottlob Frege - these are all figures of history who bucked prior trends to blaze new trails in math. The philosophical debate of Poincare and Frege came to fist fights in bars, as mathematicians hotly contested the way to view not just numbers but the entire field itself. It was a period of intense mental energy and coupled with the sensation that, ultimately, everything was knowable through the power of math (and by extension, science).

It doesn't get more classically steampunk than that.

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