Axioms: Sets (Russell’s Paradox)

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) It isn’t too often that we think about or even explore the fundamental building blocks of mathematics. These building blocks are called axioms. Axioms are statements taken to be true, i.e. they cannot be proven. This causes mathematicians, whether they know it or not, to take a lot of things on faith. All of […]

Banach-Tarski Paradox

It is a common occurrence in mathematics that when something does go wrong, it goes terribly wrong. This exact phenomenon occurs with the Banach-Tarski Paradox. Informally, it says that one can take a sphere (in 3 or more dimensional space) can be split into finitely many pieces and, using only rigid motions, can be rearranged […]

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Month: May 2016

Axioms: Sets (Russell’s Paradox)

Banach-Tarski Paradox