Monthly Archives: September 2016

The Mathematics of Marriage.

Daddy G.O. as he is fondly called, who gas been married for 47 years shared with the audience at the first annual lecture of Pastor E.A. Adeboye Professorial Chair for mathematics, the four simultaneous linear equations for successful marital life. Pastor Adeboye supported each equation with relevant biblical verses as he told the audience at the main auditorium of the University of Lagos, UNILAG, that his understanding of the mathematics of marriage is what has kept his marriage strong. “I told my children that why I have remained married for 47 years is because I understand the mathematics of marriage. Mathematics is a science of living,” he said.

His equation number 1, which states that ‘Love is blind’, was supported with a biblical passage from Proverbs 10:12, which states that love covers a multitude of sins. Then he said the explanation for Equation number 2, ‘which is that “marriage is a miracle worker with special anointing for curing blindness”’ could be found in Genesis 29:16-25 which gives the account of how Jacob was so much in love that he did not know it was Leah that was given to him in marriage instead of Rachel until the next day. When simultaneously calculated, he said the result shows that during courtship, love does not make shortcomings obvious until after marriage, when all doubts about character are cleared. Moving on to Equation number 3, which states that “Angels don’t eat jollof rice”, he made reference to Judges 6:11-21 where the sacrifice Gideon offered to the angel was consumed by fire, while he said Equation number 4 is that angels don’t marry Matthew 22:30. In essence, Pastor Adeboye explained that women eat jollof rice so they are not angels and are not perfect, just like men. He advised couples to have reasonable expectations of their spouses and not expect them to be like angels. Pastor Adeboye was the first Master’s and Ph.D student of Mathematics produced by the University of Lagos. The Apapa Family of the RCCG endowed the professorial chair in Mathematics, valued at N50 million at the university on his behalf in 2009. *Pastor and Pastor (Mrs.) Adeboye *Pastor and Pastor (Mrs.) Adeboye The UNILAG Vice Chancellor, Prof. Rahamon Bello, announced at the lecture that the university would confer an honorary doctoral degree of science on Pastor Adeboye for his contribution to life and the growth of his church. “In recognition of Pastor Adeboye’s contribution to life and the growth of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, the Senate of the University of Lagos has approved the award of a Doctor of Science (D.Sc) Honoris Causa to Pastor Adeboye. We look forward to the award will be bestowed on him officially,” he said. Responding, Adeboye said he would accept the award with joy. “While I have humbly rejected the awards of many universities, I will gladly accept that of the University of Lagos,” said the man of God. *Culled from Redemption Light

The Beginnings of Greek Mathematics

With the possible exception of astronomy, mathematics is the oldest and most continuously
pursued of the exact sciences. Its origins lie shrouded in the mists of antiquity. We are often
told that in mathematics all roads lead back to Greece. But the Greeks themselves had other ideas about where mathematics began. A favored one is represented by Aristotle, who in his Metaphysics wrote: “The mathematical sciences originated in the neighborhood of Egypt, because there the priestly class
was allowed leisure.” This is partly true, for the most spectacular advances in mathematics have occurred contemporaneously with the existence of a leisure class devoted to
the pursuit of knowledge. A more prosaic view is that mathematics arose from practical
needs. The Egyptians required ordinary arithmetic in the daily transactions of commerce
and state government to x taxes, to calculate the interest on loans, to compute wages,
and to construct a workable calendar. Simple geometric rules were applied to determine
boundaries of elds and the contents of granaries. As Herodotus called Egypt the gift of
the Nile, we could call geometry a second gift. For with the annual ooding of the Nile
Valley, it became necessary for purposes of taxation to determine how much land had
been gained or lost. This was the view of the Greek commentator Proclus (A.D. 410–485),
whose Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements is our invaluable source of
information on pre-Euclidean geometry:

According to most accounts geometry was rst discovered among the Egyptians and originated in the measuring of their lands. This was necessary for them because the Nile over ows
and obliterates the boundaries between their properties.

Although the initial emphasis was on utilitarian mathematics, the subject began eventually to be studied for its own sake. Algebra evolved ultimately from the techniques of calculation, and theoretical geometry began with land measurement.
Most historians date the beginning of the recovery of the ancient past in Egypt from
Napoleon Bonaparte’s ill-fated invasion of 1798. In April of that year, Napoleon set sail
from Toulon with an army of 38,000 soldiers crammed into 328 ships. He was intent
on seizing Egypt and thereby threatening the land routes to the rich British possessions  in India. Although England’s Admiral Nelson destroyed much of the French eet a
month after the army debarked near Alexandria, the campaign dragged on another 12
months before Napoleon abandoned the cause and hurried back to France. Yet what had
been a French military disaster was a scientic triumph. Napoleon had carried with his
expeditionary force a commission on the sciences and arts, a carefully chosen body of
167 scholars—including the mathematicians Gaspard Monge and Jean-Baptiste Fourier—
charged with making a comprehensive inquiry into every aspect of the life of Egypt
in ancient and modern times. The grand plan had been to enrich the world’s store of
knowledge while softening the impact of France’s military adventures by calling attention
to the superiority of her culture.
The savants of the commission were captured by the British but generously allowed
to return to France with their notes and drawings. In due course, they produced a truly
monumental work with the title D´escription de l’Egypte. This work ran to 9 folio volumes
of text and 12 volumes of plates, published over 25 years. The text itself was divided into
four parts concerned respectively with ancient Egyptian civilization, monuments, modern
Egypt, and natural history. Never before or since has an account of a foreign land been
made so completely, so accurately, so rapidly, and under such dificult conditions.
The D´escription de l’Egypte, with its sumptuous and magnificently illustrated folios,
thrust the riches of ancient Egypt on a society accustomed to the antiquities of Greece
and Rome. The sudden revelation of a nourishing civilization, older than any known
so far, aroused immense interest in European cultural and scholarly circles. What made
the fascination even greater was that the historical records of this early society were
in a script that no one had been able to translate into a modern language. The same
military campaign of Napoleon provided the literary clue to the Egyptian past, for one
of his engineers uncovered the Rosetta Stone and realized its possible importance for
deciphering hieroglyphics.
Most of our knowledge of early mathematics in Egypt comes from two sizable papyri,
each named after its former owner—the Rhind Papyrus and the Golenischev. The latter
is sometimes called the Moscow Papyrus, since it reposes in the Museum of Fine Arts in
Moscow. The Rhind Papyrus was purchased in Luxor, Egypt, in 1858 by the Scotsman
A. Henry Rhind and was subsequently willed to the British Museum. When the health
of this young lawyer broke down, he visited the milder climate of Egypt and became an
archaeologist, specializing in the excavation of Theban tombs. It was in Thebes, in the
ruins of a small building near the Ramesseum, that the papyrus was said to have been
found

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Mathematics and Algorithm

In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm (ⁱ/ˈælɡərɪðəm/ AL-gə-ri-dhəm) is a self-contained step-by-step set of operations to be performed. Algorithms perform calculation, data processing, and/or automated reasoning tasks.

The words ‘algorithm’ and ‘algorism‘ come from the name al-Khwārizmī. Al-Khwārizmī (Persian: خوارزمی‎‎, c. 780–850) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, geographer, and scholar.

An algorithm is an effective method that can be expressed within a finite amount of space and time^[1] and in a well-defined formal language^[2] for calculating a function.^[3] Starting from an initial state and initial input (perhaps empty),^[4] the instructions describe a computation that, when executed, proceeds through a finite^[5] number of well-defined successive states, eventually producing “output”^[6] and terminating at a final ending state. The transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic; some algorithms, known as randomized algorithms, incorporate random input.^[7]

The concept of algorithm has existed for centuries; however, a partial formalization of what would become the modern algorithm began with attempts to solve the Entscheidungsproblem (the “decision problem”) posed by David Hilbert in 1928. Subsequent formalizations were framed as attempts to define “effective calculability“^[8] or “effective method”;^[9] those formalizations included the Gödel–Herbrand–Kleene recursive functions of 1930, 1934 and 1935, Alonzo Church‘s lambda calculus of 1936, Emil Post‘s “Formulation 1” of 1936, and Alan Turing‘s Turing machines of 1936–7 and 1939. Giving a formal definition of algorithms, corresponding to the intuitive notion, remains a challenging problem.^[10]