Thursday, May 10, 2018

Provability and numerical experiments

A tempting view of mathematics is that mathematicians are discovering not facts about what is true, but about what is provable from what.

But proof is not the only way mathematicians have of getting at truth. Numerical experiment is another. For instance, while we don’t have a proof of Goldbach’s Conjecture (each even number bigger than two is the sum of two primes), it has been checked to hold for numbers up to 4 ⋅ 1018. This seems to give significant inductive evidence that Goldbach’s Conjecture is true. But it does not seem to give significant evidence that Goldbach’s Conjecture can be proved.

Here’s why. Admittedly, when we learned that that the conjecture holds for some particular number n, say 13, we also learned that the conjecture can be proved for that specific number n (e.g., 13 = 11 + 2 and 11 and 2 are prime, etc.). Inductively, then, this gives us significant evidence that for each particular number n, Goldbach’s conjecture for n is provable (to simplify notation, stipulate Goldbach’s Conjecture to hold trivially for odd n or n < 4). But one cannot move from ∀n Provable(G(n)) to Provable(∀n G(n)) (to abuse notation a little).

The issue is that the inductive evidence we have gathered strongly supports the claim that Goldbach’s Conjecture is true, but gives much less evidence for the further claim that Goldbach’s Conjecture is provable.

The argument above is a parallel to the standard argument in the philosophy of science that the success of the practice of induction is best explained by scientific realism.

3 comments:

JohnD said...

Does this sentence have a typo?

The issue is that the inductive evidence we have gathered strongly supports the claim that Goldbach’s Conjecture is true, but gives much less evidence for the further claim that Goldbach’s Conjecture is true.

If not, can you explain it? Thanks!

Alexander R Pruss said...

The last "true" should have been "provable". Sorry!

Martin Cooke said...

I want maths to be about the scientific discovery of truths about numbers, but it is about proofs from axioms. And mathematicians do not, in their capacity as mathematicians, put any store by such inductive evidence. They point to the rare cases where inductive evidence of some huge amount indicates something that is false. That is what mathematicians care about: proof. That is just a fact about mathematics.