1 In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word was Fuzzy

The world is awesome. The world is immense and complex, it is not easy to understand, not easy to change – but we humans have mastered it reasonably well. Because of the unstoppable progress of human knowledge, we live happier and longer lives, we travel faster, we recover faster from illnesses and accidents. During the millennia of our civilization, great geniuses provided breakthrough insights, and numerous scientists and engineers, geniuses and simply talented, translated these insights into practically useful ideas. In the history of science, we can track many such insights – e.g., the idea of an atom. The history of ideas is fascinating and complex, but in a nutshell, each idea follows the same basic trajectory: First, we have a vague philosophical idea, then it is transformed into a more precise (but still somewhat vague) idea formulated in the language of natural sciences, and finally, the idea becomes described in the absolutely precise language – language of mathematics. I have always been fascinated by the two extremal point of this process