The invention of the alphabet is at the origin of a fundamental change in our relationship to knowledge and the world. In particular, the Greek alphabet greatly contributed to shaping our cultures, leading up to today’s “term rewriting machines” that are changing our lives. The vision of a world completely describable in elementary and simple components lies at the foundation of two techno-sciences of great interest and power. We informally compare the different perspectives proposed in cognition and the natural sciences through differing mathematical tools, such as continuous versus discrete mathematics. Historical and contemporary scientific alternatives will be briefly discussed.

Giuseppe Longo is a Research Director CNRS (Emeritus), Cavaillès interdisciplinary center of Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris (ENS), formely in the Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, at ENS (1990-2012). He has been Professor of Mathematics for Informatics, University of Pisa (1981-1990) and adjunct professor, School of Medicine, Tufts U., Boston (2013-19). He spent three years in the USA (Berkeley, M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon) as researcher and visiting professor, and frequent visitor in Oxford (GB) and Utrecht (NL). Founder and editor-in-chief (1990-2015) of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, Camdridge U.P.., he is (co-)author of more than 100 papers and six books. In the last 20 years, he extended his research interests and work to the epistemology of mathematics and theoretical biology