The Chinese Room Argument, Understanding Math and the imposter syndrome

The Chinese Room Argument

 was first published in a 1980 article by American philosopher John Searle. He imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he sends appropriate strings of Chinese characters back out under the door, and this leads those outside to mistakenly suppose there is a Chinese speaker in the room.

 

So it was with me and math as an undergraduate due to a history dating back to age 10.  I hit college being very good at manipulating symbols whose meaning I was never given to understand.  I grew up 45 miles from the nearest synagogue.  My fanatically religious grandfather thought it was better not to attend services at all than to drive up there on the Sabbath.  My father was a young lawyer building a practice, and couldn’t close his office on Friday.   So my he taught me how to read Hebrew letters and reproduce how they sound, so I could read from the Torah at my Bar Mitzvah (which I did comprehending nothing).  Since I’m musical, learning the cantillations under the letters wasn’t a problem.

 

I’ve always loved math and solving problems of the plug and chug variety was no problem.  I’d become adept years earlier at this type of thing thanks to my religiously rigid grandfather.   It was the imposter syndrome writ large.  I’ve never felt like this about organic chemistry and it made a good deal of intuitive sense the first time I ran into it.  For why have a look at — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/why-math-is-hard-for-me-and-organic-chemistry-is-easy/

 

If there is anything in math full of arcane symbols calling for lots of mechanical manipulation, it is the differential geometry and tensors needed to understand General relativity.   So I’ve plowed through a lot of it, but still don’t see what’s really going on.

 

Enter Tristan Needham’s book “Visual Differential Geometry and Forms”.  I’ve written about it several times

Here — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2021/07/12/a-premature-book-review-and-a-60-year-history-with-complex-variables-in-4-acts/

Here– https://luysii.wordpress.com/2021/12/04/a-book-worth-buying-for-the-preface-alone-or-how-to-review-a-book-you-havent-read/

and Here — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2022/03/07/visual-differential-geometry-and-forms-q-take-3/

 

If you’ve studied any math, his approach will take getting used to as it’s purely visual and very UNalgebraic.  But what is curvature but a geometric concept.

 

So at present I’m about 80 pages away from completing Needham’s discussion of general relativity.  I now have an intuitive understanding of curvature, torsion, holonomy, geodesics and the Gauss map that I never had before.   It is very slow going, but very clear.  Hopefully I’ll make it to p. 333.  Wish me luck.

How to study math by yourself far away from an academic center

“Differential geometry is the study of things that are invariant under a change of notation.”   Sad but true, and not original as it appears in the introduction to two different differential geometry books I own.

Which brings me to symbol tables and indexes in math books. If you have a perfect mathematical mind and can read math books straight through understanding everything and never need to look back in the book for a symbol or concept you’re not clear on, then you don’t need them.  I suspect most people aren’t like that.  I’m not.

Even worse is failing to understand something (say the connection matrix) and trying to find another discussion in another book.  If you go to an older book (most of which do not have symbol tables) the notation will likely be completely different and you have to start back at ground zero.  This happened when I tried to find what a connection form was, finding the discussion in one book rather skimpy.  I found it in O’Neill’s book on elementary differential geometry, but the notation was completely different and I had to read page after page to pick up the lingo until I could understand his discussion (which was quite clear).

Connections are important, and they underlie gauge theory and a lot of modern physics.

Good math books aren’t just theorem proof theorem proof, but have discussions about why you’d want to know something etc. etc.  Even better are discussions about why things are the way they are.  Tu’s book on Differential geometry is particularly good on this, showing (after a careful discussion of why the directional derivative is the way it is) how the rather abstract definition of a connection on a manifold arises by formalizing the properties of the directional derivative and using them to define the connection.

Unfortunately, he presents curvature in a very ad hoc fashion, and I’m back to starting at ground zero in another book (older and without a symbol table).

Nonetheless I find it very helpful when taking notes to always start by listing what is given.  Then a statement of the theorem, particularly putting statements like for all i in { 1, …. ,n} in front.  In particular if a concept is defined, put how the concept is written in the definition

e.g.

Given X, Y smooth vector fields

def:  Lie Bracket (written [ X, Y ] ) ::= DxY – DyX

with maybe a link to a page in your notes where Dx is defined

So before buying a math book, look to see how fulsome the index is, and whether it has a symbol table.

 

Two math tips

Two of the most important theorems in differential geometry are Gauss’s Theorem egregium and the Inverse function theorem. Basically the theorem egregium says that you don’t need to look at the shape of a two dimensional surface (say the surface of a walnut) from outside (e.g. from the way it sits in 3 dimensional space) to understand its shape. All the information is contained in the surface itself.

The inverse function theorem (InFT) is used over and over. If you have a continuous function from Euclidean space U of finite dimension n to Euclidean space V of the same dimension, and certain properties of its derivative are present at a point x of U, then there exists a another function to get you back from space V to U.

Even better, once you’ve proved the inverse function theorem, proof of another important theorem (the implicit function theorem aka the ImFT) is quite simple. The ImFT lets you know if given f(x, y, .. .) –> R (e.g. a real valued function) if you can express one variable (say x) in terms of the others. Again sometimes it’s difficult to solve such an equation for x in terms of y — consider arctan(e^(x + y^2) * sin(xy) + ln x). What is important to know in this case, is whether it’s even possible.

The proofs of both are tricky. In particular, the proof of the inverse function theorem is an existence proof. You may not be able to write down the function from V to U even though you’ve just proved that it exists. So using the InFT to prove the implicit function theory is also nonconstructive.

At some point in your mathematical adolescence, you should sit down and follow these proofs. They aren’t easy and they aren’t short.

Here’s where to go. Both can be found in books by James J. Callahan, emeritus professor of Mathematics at Smith College in Northampton Mass. The proof of the InVT is to be found on pages 169 – 174 of his “Advanced Calculus, A Geometric View”, which is geometric, with lots of pictures. What’s good about this proof is that it’s broken down into some 13 steps. Be prepared to meet a lot of functions and variables.

Just the statement of InVT involves functions f, f^-1, df, df^-1, spaces U^n, R^n, variables a, q, B

The proof of InVT involves functions g, phi, dphi, h, dh, N, most of which are vector valued (N is real valued)

Then there are the geometric objects U^n, R^n, Wa, Wfa, Br, Br/2

Vectors a, x, u, delta x, delta u, delta v, delta w

Real number r

That’s just to get you through step 8 of the 13 step proof, which proves the existence of the inverse function (aka f^-1). The rest involves proving properties of f^-1 such as continuity and differentiability. I must confess that just proving existence of f^-1 was enough for me.

The proof of the implicit function theorem for two variables — e.g. f(x, y) = k takes less than a page (190).

The proof of the Theorem Egregium is to be found in his book “The Geometry of Spacetime” pp. 258 – 262 in 9 steps. Be prepared for fewer functions, but many more symbols.

As to why I’m doing this please see https://luysii.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/some-new-years-resolutions/

How to think about two tricky theorems and other matters

I’m continuing to plow through classic differential geometry en route to studying manifolds en route to understanding relativity. The following thoughts might help someone just starting out.

Derivatives of one variable functions are fairly easy to understand. Plot y = f(x) and measure the slope of the curve. That’s the derivative.

So why do you need a matrix to find the derivative for more than one variable? Imagine standing on the side of a mountain. The slope depends on the direction you look. So something giving you the slope(s) of a mountain just has to be more complicated. It must be something that operates on the direction you’re looking (e.g. a vector).

Another point to remember about derivatives is that they basically take something that looks bumpy (like a mountain), look very closely at it under a magnifying glass and flatten it out (e.g. linearize it). Anything linear comes under the rubric of linear algebra — about which I wrote a lot, because it underlies quantum mechanics — for details see the 9 articles I wrote about it in — https://luysii.wordpress.com/category/linear-algebra-survival-guide-for-quantum-mechanics/.

Any linear transformation of a vector (of which the direction of your gaze on the side of a mountain is but one) can be represented by a matrix of numbers, which is why to find a slope in the direction of a vector it must be multiplied by a matrix (the Jacobian if you want to get technical).

Now on to the two tricky theorems — the Inverse Function Theorem and the Implicit Function theorem. I’ve been plowing through a variety of books on differential geometry (Banchoff & Lovett, McInenery, DoCarmo, Kreyszig, Thorpe) and they all refer you for proofs of both to an analysis book. They are absolutely crucial to differential geometry, so it’s surprising that none of these books prove them. They all involve linear transformations (because derivatives are linear) from an arbitrary real vector space R^n — elements are ordered n-tuples of real numbers to to another real vector space R^m. So they must inherently involve matrices, which quickly gets rather technical.

To keep your eye on the ball let’s go back to y = f(x). Y and x are real numbers. They have the lovely property that between any two real numbers there lies another, and between those two another and another. So there is no smallest real number greater than 0. If there is a point x at which the derivative isn’t zero but some positive number a to keep it simple (but a negative number would work as well), then y is increasing at x. If the derivative is continuous at a (which it usually is) then there is a delta greater than zero such that the derivative is greater than zero in the open interval (x – delta, x + delta). This means that y = f(x) is always increasing over that interval. This means that there is a one to one function y = g(x) defined over the same interval. This is called an inverse function.

Now you’re ready for the inverse function theorem — but the conditions are the same — the derivative at a point should be greater than zero and continuous at that point — and an inverse function exists. The trickiness and the mountains of notation come from the fact that the function is from R^n to R^m where n and m are any positive integers.

It’s important to know that, although the inverse and implicit functions are shown logically to exist, almost never can they be written down explicitly. The implicit function theorem follows from the inverse function theorem with even more notation involved, but this is the basic idea behind them.

A few other points on differential geometry. Much of it involves surfaces, and they are defined 3 ways. The easiest way to understand two of them takes you back to the side of a mountain. Now you’re standing on it half way up and wondering which would be the best way to get to the top. So you whip out your topographic map which has lines of constant elevation on it. This brings to the first way to define a surface. Assume the mountain is given by the function z = f (x, y) — every point on the earth has a height above it where the land stops and the sky beings (z) — so the function is a parameterization of the surface. Another way to define a surface in space is by level sets: put z equal to some height — call it z’ and define the surface as the set of two dimensional points (x, y) such that f (x, y ) = z’. These are the lines of constant elevation (e.g. the contour lines) – on the mountain. Differential geometry takes a broad view of surfaces — yes a curve on f (x, y) is considered a surface, just as a surface of constant temperature around the sun is a level set on f(x,y,z). The third way to define a surface is by f (x1, x2, …, xn) = 0. This is where the implicit function theorem comes in if some variables are in fact functions of others.

Well, I hope this helps when you plunge into the actual details.

For the record — the best derivation of these theorems are in Apostol Mathematical Analysis 1957 third printing pp. 138 – 148. The development is leisurely and quite clear. I bought the book in 1960 for $10.50. The second edition came out in ’74 — you can now buy it for 76.00 from Amazon — proving you should never throw out your old math books.