User blog:Wolfram Brimley/Wolfram Brimley On Googology

Good morning, I’m Wolfram Brimley and I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes about googology.

Actually, about googology, and how its affected me in my life. I’ll start when I was first introduced. I was confused a great deal, was seeing symbols and notations that were strange and unfamiliar to me. For instance, I had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, my brain felt like a hungry sponge. I was losing my ignorance, losing my lethargy - I was getting up every 15 or 20 minutes all through the day so I could learn more math; and as a result of all these things I lost all my ignorance.

And I was, I was scared, (mathematician doesn’t like to admit he was scared), but I truly was - I wasn’t afraid to learn - I know that must be done by all of us. But, what I was afraid of was - that I might have to count a very long time to reach some of these numbers, much longer than I felt like, and I really wasn’t interested in that! So finally at the urging of my teachers, the ones who teach me the most, I went to see a googologist. And he explained things to me in a language that I understood.

And I think the most important thing he said to me was: "Wolfram, if you want to get smarter, I’m going to give you a few problems to solve. And the more attention you pay to these things, and the diligent you are, the faster your functions will grow, and the more growth your array notations will develop."

And ladies and gentleman, that’s exactly the way it’s been. Through the years, the closer I paid attention to the advice of my googologist, the faster my functions grow. Now I’m not Emlightened! - And I’ve slipped up, and I’ve made salad numbers and naive extensions and I’ve done things only a novice would do! But I wanna tell ya, when I don’t make salad numbers and I don’t make naive extensions and I formally define my notations and I participate in the googology course, and I take my math lessons, and I do the procedures that I was instructed to do - I do perform better.

I would encourage all of you to find a googologist you can learn from, and understand. - I’m not doing this without help, I’m surrounded by aspiring googologists who teach me, who answer my questions, and who want me to create fast-growing functions!

Now, one of the things I’ve learned to do, is laugh at myself, kinda loosen up. Kinda relax about the whole learning process. You know, being educated in the leading formal ordinal notations is not the most difficult thing in the world, you know, people like LittlePeng9 have learned to live like this. And along the trail, you’re going to find some numbers you ought to be laughing at, (sexvigintillion). So I would encourage you loosen up.

There’s a line in a song:

"Numberless reality, visions of infinity."

You know it’s not a bad idea once in a while to focus on the infinite so as to generate the absurdly large finite numbers, such as by using the fast-growing hierarchy!

I guess at this point I want to tell you about an experience I had while learning googology, along my path of intellectual edification, if you will. I was very, very fortunate to be introduced to Sbiis Saibian, the googologist, having his number names forever ingrained on my memory, so that over the years I’ve been able to produce a love, or admiration, or appreciation - whatever the name you wanna give 'em - of googology. And in doing so Saibian has put out some information that’s invaluable to googologists.

The Googology Wikia is a wiki that’s staffed with admins that are willing to talk to you about your notations, that are willing to help you in your lemmas, and you do require formal lemmas, ladies and gentleman, when you’re first devising naive notations you will make a myriad of mistakes. And what the wiki will do is help you find solutions to these problems, rectifications to incomplete theorems. I like to say: we will, we will help you go where we have been, and in doing so you’ll find that recreational mathematics has some wonderful things to offer for you.

There are so many new ways to generate large numbers, there are more people qualified to help teach you and give you accurate and valid information than there were three years ago; the comparison is unreal. In closing I would simply like to say to you: do the best you can with what you’ve got, and be thankful that you’ve made no worse notations that you have made.

And if you listen to other’s recommendations, and do these simple things I promise ya you’ll theorize better - see if I’m not right! Thanks for your time, have a good day.

Based on this video.