The Art Historian Physicist

Well, we all know Euclid´s “Elements” and weird problems such as prime counting functions (see Terence Tao´s blog for this). A simple addendum to Euclid´s ideas would be to say that instead of the normal axioms (0 dimension = point, 1 dimension = line etc…) a monomial or polynomial already encodes such properties.

Instead of writing “Elements”, wouldn´t a “Polynomials” book be more accurate nowadays?

I give three immediate examples: Einstein´s general relativity would be an harmonic oscillator of a “group” of polynomials (very witten-esque isn´t it!!!!).

Jacob Lurie´s attempt of introducing path integrals (through his weird language) between algebra (weird since any first year calculus student knows algebra ≠ calculus) would simply be the least action of this “group”.

Finally, I´m talking about “groups” here but what is a group? I think probably a type III von Neumann algebra coupled with some sort of flow (be it modular or not; see Tomita-Takesaki lecutres on Springer) would suffice to define these polynomials.

Cheers