A New Start
June 29, 2010
Hello World! Or at least hello to that part of the world with an interest in things mathematical, religious, or (even better) both.
I’m Sarah Voss, and here is the debut of the newly-upgraded pi.zine! — a website dedicated (well, mostly dedicated) to the relationship between math and religion. Please browse. If you want to add a comment, feel free to use the reply box below or, better yet, check out the Circle Friends page.
pizine 
August 1, 2010 at 4:29 pm
Dear Sarah,
I was so happy to see your new website I wrote a Ph.D dissertation at Northwestern
a while back called “Topological Theology” in which I discussed math and specifically topological metaphors for theology. I love your Cantorian metaphors, they bear more discussion and expansion, have you written
more about them somewhere?
I was a part time math instructor for years at places like San Jose State CA but my Ph.D in theology didn’t get
me very far. Do you know the work “Infinity and the Mind” by Rudy Rucker? Rudy’s a friend of mine out here in California, and a wonderfuly creative writer. He writes a lot of science fiction now.
I met Rudy ( we both taught at San Jose State but didn’t really know each other there, oddly enough) at my
local church in Los Gatos CA, St. Luke’s Episcopal after not seeing him for decades, it must have been divine intervention, honestly.
So, just wanted to say hi, I’m looking forward to reading more of your work. I’m just now finally getting around to re-writing and renewing my dissertation….hopefully I’ll have a website as nice as yours someday soon.
Cheers,
Barry Wright
August 1, 2010 at 5:52 pm
Thanks for the nice thought(s), Barry. Hopefully the comments here will be the start of a more systematic way for those of us who share an interest in matheology to connect.
A copy of Infinity and the Mind sits on my library shelf. Well, actually I just pulled it off the shelf to take another look at it — I remember how much Rucker’s work influenced my early thought process, so it will be fun to re-examine it at this later stage of my own work. In particular I want to review what he wrote about the One and the Many (Chapter 5) and Cantor and Gödel (Excursions I and II) since I wrote about these topics in What Number Is God? and, later, in “Matheology and Cantorian Religion” (Religious Humanism 37:1, Winter/Spring 2004, 15-26). These subjects will come up again if the proposal I’ve been invited to submit gets funded and I get to offer my series of three “moral math” workshops (see the blurb about “Moral Math Training Sessions” on my Moral Math page). I invite you to watch for more information about these workshops on this website. Tentative plans include offering them in Omaha in July, 2011; in Arlington, Texas in late October or early November, 2012; and in Seattle in March, 2012. Note the emphasis on “tentative” — gotta get the funding first!
Can you point the way to anything online about Topological Theology?