Monday, September 25, 2006

Closure

Closely look at all the various fields that have the concept of closure. You see there is a common thread uniting all of those definitions. Anyhow when I was first introduced to closure in an elementary math class it sounded very close and intuitively appealing to me.

It boiled down to something like this: lets say all we know about is integers and suddenly we are asked to express the diagonal of a square with side of 1 meter. You'll be at a loss to express it in terms of integers as it more than a certain integer(1) and less than another integer(2) but you can never measure it off precisely using your tools (because your tools can only measure integer lengths). Well, you can do it by subdividing the tools but its a process that will take you aeons and after a lengthy stint you'll need a insight to see that this process of subdivision can produce the same result as sqrt(2).Thats what evolution is about (lower primate in us loves to go through the process whereas some other higher form tells us there is another way). When we have this way, we say the issue is "closed" under some arbitrary property.

I tend to think certain emotions need to be closed in the sense you know of a category to put them in place. Just like in sorcery, if you name something you have power over them.(in the above case, simply call such numbers "irrational", define them rigorously and boom! you are a master).

I just "closed" such an issue for myself today. Its been more than 5 years since this bugged me in some corner of my mind like a crow.(actually they were much like a terminate and stay resident (TSR) programs that were written as viruses in C under early DOS versions..remember the "cookie monster" or "raindrop" virus? today, for me it is like cleaning the interrupt vector table(IVT) and restoring it to default). It feels really good to reach such a closure.

The only sad part is that with every closure the complexity/bloat increases slightly and sometimes you gotta give up something (for example, the closure of real numbers lead to complex numbers that costed us the relational operators like greater than,less than,equals to) . Life is complex: has both the real and imaginary parts :)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting Post. I had come across the word closure earlier but never thought there is so much to it. Interesting concept.

Congragulations on Closing an Issue. It is a great feeling to think one has closed.

Have fun

Paddy said...

[Anon A] Thank You. Yeah! Its a neat concept. I like it when something is closed, archived and probably fossilized in my mind (anh who knows might even fuel my mind someday as well)

-p

P said...

Loved the post...

Paddy said...

[perspective] Thank You! Am glad to churn out something that someone on this planet likes..