In honor of the ninetieth anniversary of G.S.Brown
I had the great pleasure of meeting George Spencer Brown at his home on Thursday, July 21, 2011. I had shared with him the abstract of my short communication lecture at the international conference for mathematics which took place in Madrid ICM2006, entitled "Various degrees of the number distinctions".
Spencer-Brown was born in 1923. He shared with me the great difficulties that he had with his mother and how it influenced the relations with women in his life. He is not married and doesn't have children. When Spencer-Brown was in school, he did not love mathematics. His parents did not have any direct influence on his decision to be a mathematician. In fact he began to be a mathematician only after he passed the age of 50 during the 1960s. (The usual belief is that you reach your full potential in mathematics before you reach the age of 30.)
Spencer-Brown and his brother worked for the British railways. They developed an electronic device to control the movement of the train. This device was working successfully, but in order to explain how it worked he decided to write the book "Laws of Form". After he finished writing the book he searched 5 years for a publisher. Finally the book was printed in 1969, but only after Bertrand Russell wrote a warm recommendation: "Not since Euclid's Elements have we seen anything like it".
During the years since then, Spencer worked on solving some great problems in mathematics, for example, finding a regular proof of the 4-color theorem. Legendre’s conjecture about the existence of a prime between squares, and the most famous problem in mathematics today, the Riemann hypothesis. Spencer-Brown claims that the electronic model which he developed with his brother for the British railway is a different model of computation from the Turing machine. Since all the computers in the world are designed according to Turing's model, this is a declaration about a possibility for a new technology!
Spencer-Brown lives modestly on a pension that he receives from the government . He has refused an offer to buy the original typescript of LOF for 150,000 pounds. Spencer-Brown's investigations today are included in about 70 notebooks (200 pages each). He works daily from midnight to 8:00 a.m. and continue his research.
Summary: After 2 years of regular phone calls once a week and the meeting with him, I think that Spencer-Brown is a great mathematician, on the order of Archimedes, Gauss, Euler, and Ramanujan! His thinking is far advanced from the understanding of our time. He is holding in his hand the key to a real breakthrough in science today. He is still suffering from the ignorance of the academic world, and I hope that this fact can be changed while he is still alive.
Conference for the unity of mathematics: In September 2003, I participated in the conference about the unity of mathematics at Harvard university. It was for the celebration of the 90th birthday of the great mathematician, Israel Gelfand. At this conference the famous mathematician, Michael Atiyah, gave a lecture in which he declared that we are waiting today for the appearance of a new Newton that will break the enigma about the connection between mathematics and physics. I agree with him. The book Laws of Form by Spencer-Brown is a solution to the challenge to find unity in mathematics -- a vision that was originally declared by David Hilbert after the presentation of a list of 23 open problems in mathematics in his lecture in Paris in ICM1900:
"…The organic unity of mathematics is inherent in the nature of this science, for mathematics is the foundation of all exact knowledge of natural phenomena. That it may completely fulfil this high mission, may the new century bring it gifted masters and many zealous and enthusiastic disciples!" --David Hilbert 8.8.1900.
We are planing a meeting to celebrate "Spencer's 90th year" start August 03, until the 05 2012, in UK.
Moshe Klein
Gan Adam L.t.d
Diego Rapoport Professor of Mathematical Physics Universidad Nacional de Quilmes Bernal, Buenos Aires, Argentina
