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# A research program for a big picture of mathematics

edited May 2018

Hi John and all, I've applied for a one-month research visit to the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. I wrote up A Research Program for a Big Picture of Mathematics. Mostly it was a chance to write up my own mathematical interests. But then the deadline was extended to August 21, so I thought I should better actually make some contacts at MCMP and resubmit. I've written to Neil Dewar, an organizer of the upcoming conference on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which I will attend, and also to Georg Schiemer, who leads the project on Mathematical Structuralism, which I learned about through your blog post last year.

On the one hand, although I have a Ph.D. in Math from UCSD in 1993, I almost feel embarassed by how little math I know. But on the other hand, I was a bit surprised at how few people at MCMP actually work on mathematics or related philosophy, and maybe nobody actually has a Ph.D. in Math. I suppose I'm just thinking that there's a smarter way of doing math that would figure out its cognitive foundations, what are we actually doing? And if I could thereby get any profound results in Math, that would be great evidence for the success of my metaphysics. So it makes sense to keep developing mathematical ideas. I'm thinking I could write an article for the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics and some day find a place online to work collaboratively and develop the foundations for a science.

So I appreciate thoughts on what a research program for a big picture of mathematics might look like and who might be interested and why.

Comment Source:PS John, I saw <a href="https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/ulam-2012-may-beauty-banking-biology">these three videos</a> by Robert May (of chaos theory) and I thought they were in parallel with your own interests: beauty of math, stability of banking and overpopulation.