Ultrafilters, Dictators, and Gods

Abstract

We will show how a well-known and elementary fact about ultrafilters can be reinterpreted both politically and theologically, thus providing simple proofs of two central results in these areas. Mathematicians can consider such formulations as the true essence of such results. Outsiders can find comfort in a saying by Goethe, who once said (Maxime und Reflectionen, 1729): “Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: as soon as you tell them something, they translate it into their own language, and it immediately appears different”.

Solomon Marcus has often stressed the broad cultural interest of mathematics, writing extensively on its connections with apparently distant areas such as poetics and theology. A few years ago he published, together with Cristian Calude and Doru Ştefănescu, an interesting paper with an unusual title, The Creator versus its creation. From Scotus to Gödel, .Collegium Logicum, Annals of the Kurt-Gödel-Society, Vol. 3, Institute of Computer Science, AS CR Prague, Vienna, 1999, 1–10, in which he was kind enough to quote a manuscript of ours on the mathematical modelling of God. His Festschrift seems a perfectly suited occasion riot only to publish those observations, but also to dedicate them to him.