Prudentia

By Javier Arturo Muñoz Justin As the sun was rising over the West Bay Area, there was a man walking to work. This man was your average guy, the type of guy you don’t pay much attention to while walking on the street. Despite being average in appearance, he was higher in status than most of us. Through fortunate, or rather should I say unfortunate events he was able to get through college and grad school with the help of a wealthy sponsor. The Economist was welcomed by thundering applause and millions of birthday wishes as he got off the elevator. ‘There he is, the man of the hour’ said a tall well-dressed man patting the economist on the back. ‘I would personally like to wish Pedrolas a very happy birthday and give great thanks for being such an outstanding role model for all of us during the many years he has been with us. I have never in my life met anyone who surpasses nuestro querido economista in either honor or dignity. So can we get another round of applause for our dear Pedrola...

Authors: Daniel Pohl, Iakovos Koukas, Noam Chomsky Introduction The distinction between competence and performance has played a foundational role in the philosophy of linguistics. Competence is a grasp of the structural properties of all the sentences of a language. Performance involves actual real-time use and may diverge from the underlying competence. Idealizing away from psycholinguistically relevant factors like limits on memory and processing plays a significant role in various essential debates within the field of linguistics. Perhaps the most central and famous is the issue of whether English is a finite-state language. This article provides a proof of the relevant theorem, originally from Chomsky 1959. The claim that any finite-state automaton does not accept English is supported by showing that every grammar for English has self-embedding to an unbounded depth. Self-Embedding The economical production forms for context-free languages, especially the Chomsky normal-for...

In the land of Esmeralda lived a boy named Flanders. Not yet eighteen years old, he had already made a name for himself a name as an artist and composer. At the age of six he had already painted a of his older sister Gisela, a very beautiful young woman, and with this work he had his abilities as a painter impressively demonstrated. At the same time, he also began to play the piano and was soon able to play all the national anthems of the world and composed his own serenades and fugues. Flanders had also tried his hand as a dramatist. At the age of sixteen, his play "The Scent of Marigolds" had its world premiere, which was highly praised by the media. With unusual elegance, Flanders described the effect of the local flora on the female sex. The play was so dramatic that it captured the hearts of the audience and remained in their memories for a long time. Flanders also occasionally worked on mathematics; he succeeded in solving several hitherto unresolved problems and provin...

I already wrote in the March issue of Prudentia Journal that there are a lot of high IQ societies and that many share the same members. What I have not investigated is the question whether it would make sense to merge all high IQ societies into one. First of all, we must be clear on the question what sense high IQ societies make. 1. They have websites with lists of members, so by joining a high IQ society you appear on the Internet and it is documented for everybody that you have a particular IQ. 2. They help likeminded people get to know each other. For the second purpose it might be sufficient if there were just one big high IQ society. But for the first purpose, maybe the current situation is better because different high IQ societies have different minimum IQ criteria. Randy Myers and Iakovos Koukas have several high IQ societies with different entrance criteria and this makes sense only inasmuch as people want to be differentiated. But this would not be a problem with having a sin...

Welcome to the fifteenth issue of Prudentia Journal! Happy third anniversary of Prudentia High IQ Society! Three years after its foundation, Prudentia has more than 60 members from 26 different countries. This makes Prudentia one of the fastest growing high IQ societies in this world. And yet I have asked myself the question: Should all high IQ societies merge into one? This is the topic this issue of Prudentia Journal is investigating. Enjoy reading! Claus Volko, cdvolko (at) gmail (dot) com

Tim Roberts maintains the website http://www.unsolvedproblems.org/ in which he presents unsolved problems from mathematics, mostly conjectures that yet lack a formal proof. While working on these problems is fun, it may be useful to know that some problems might be unsolvable, so they are not worth the effort trying to solve them. By means of formal logic we can show that some problems are probably unsolvable. If we can reformulate a statement to be of the type "there does not exist any n for which ...", it is probably unprovable. Examples: Goldbach Conjecture The Goldbach Conjecture states that every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes. A number is prime if it is divisible only by itself and 1. So, for example, 36 = 17+19. This is equivalent to: For every integer n greater than 1, there is an integer k so that both n - k and n + k are prime numbers. Employing the existential quantifier only, we can reformulate this to: There does not exist any integer n grea...

I have recently started re-reading the original paper on the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) by Christopher Langan. This paper is from 2002 and it was widely ignored or rejected by the academic world, but most of the criticism was not because of faults in the author's argumentation but because the readers had problems understanding the paper. Many critics stated that Christopher Langan was using words and phrases they did not know. By contrast, I had no problems reading the paper. Perhaps this is due to my higher intelligence. That makes me think: For academic discourse, an above-average level of intelligence is necessary. Some topics can only be discussed by highly intelligent people. This has nothing to do with elitism, it is human nature. Now the question is whether highly intelligent people are actually interested in discussing academic subjects. Sometimes I have the impression that the people in high IQ world have no interests other than intelligence testing i...