‘Modus Indorum’: The Digital Age of Binary-Truth

By the 10 Century CE, its meanings lost in the land of its birth, the Symbol ‘0’ headed West. The Symbol stops for a tour of Baghdad and Moorish Spain before finally docking in Venice.

The Clergy, users of the Abacus, were unimpressed. The Roman script at that time didn’t have a symbol for Absence. But the economy was booming. Zero-Balance Bookkeeping had just been discovered. And this new symbol just fit the bill of the emerging mercantile classes.

[It was not the fierce love for esoteric truth from the mysterious East. The Symbol helped make money. A refreshingly sensible reason. That’s why the Symbol ‘0’ came West.]

If the early philosophical links with the West were Greek, the first mathematical links were Italian. It begins with ‘Fibonacci’ and his book: Modus Indorum. [‘The Greatest Western Mathematician of the Middle Period’]

The trend to conceptualization accelerates with Guiseppe Peano [1858-1932] and the first of his five celebrated postulates: ‘Zero is a natural number’. The Symbol now is definitionally a Concept.

The Peano Postulates have a long reach. Russell and Whitehead’s encyclopedic Principia Mathematica began as an attempt to extend Peano’s work. Kurt Gödel’s celebrated Theorem was in response to it. And it finally lead to the question: ‘What is Mathematical Truth?’ See Posts.

A Turing Machine is a device that uses a set of rules to work a list of symbols on a length of tape. And it was the progenitor of the idea that became the modern computer. Or more accurately, what we call ‘Software’.

Kurt Gödel‘s paper was published in 1930. Alan Turing applied Gödel‘s work to solve issues fundamental in the birthing of Modern Software [‘Undecidability’; The ‘Halting Problem’, et al]. And Academic Departments went about marveling at the quirkiness of ‘Strange Loops’.

Within a decade of Gödel’s Theorem, pioneering Mathematicians had laid down the blueprint for what would emerge as the Digital-Age and the celebration of binary-truths. Today’s: ‘Age of Information’.

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What is wrong with the Binary-Gods? What is it with brilliant Logicians who see too far? Why are the deities of Consistency and Rule so indifferent to their pioneering children? Godel died from self-imposed starvation, according to the coroner; Turing, from cyanide poisoning.]