I just had a weird thought
in [Logic]
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From: Aatu Koskensilta on 11 May 2010 10:07 Marshall <marshall.spight(a)gmail.com> writes: > On May 11, 6:34�am, Charlie-Boo <shymath...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> (You used to be one of the rebels ... ) > > Remember that haircut he had back when he was younger? Now THAT was > rebellion. My dear Marshall, I have absolutely no idea what you're on about. My current hairdo is about as rebellious as I've ever had. (You can verify this for yourself at Facebook, which abomination I was pressganged into joining some time ago, but take perverse joy in leaving my page in in a state of utter dereliction, this joy not at all unlike the immense pleasure I derive from devising convoluted sentences that more-or-less naturally allow for duplicated prepositions which at first sight seem an error, but turn out to be, on closer reflection, a matter of grammatical necessity, or at least plausibly not altogether inexcusable. (It cheers me no end, now that I notice it, that I managed, in the course of the previous sentence, to inadvertently offend those most despicable idiots who insist, inspired in their insistence by American style manuals and a vague sense of unfounded linguistic superiority, on bafflingly arbitrary rules on the use of "that" and "which"...)) -- Aatu Koskensilta (aatu.koskensilta(a)uta.fi) "Wovon man nicht sprechan kann, dar�ber muss man schweigen" - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
From: Charlie-Boo on 11 May 2010 10:50 On May 11, 10:07 am, Aatu Koskensilta <aatu.koskensi...(a)uta.fi> wrote: > Marshall <marshall.spi...(a)gmail.com> writes: > > On May 11, 6:34 am, Charlie-Boo <shymath...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > >> (You used to be one of the rebels ... ) > > > Remember that haircut he had back when he was younger? Now THAT was > > rebellion. > > My dear Marshall, I have absolutely no idea what you're on about. My > current hairdo is about as rebellious as I've ever had. (You can verify > this for yourself at Facebook, which abomination I was pressganged into > joining some time ago, but take perverse joy in leaving my page in in a > state of utter dereliction, this joy not at all unlike the immense > pleasure I derive from devising convoluted sentences that more-or-less > naturally allow for duplicated prepositions which at first sight seem an > error, but turn out to be, on closer reflection, a matter of grammatical > necessity, or at least plausibly not altogether inexcusable. (It cheers > me no end, now that I notice it, that I managed, in the course of the > previous sentence, to inadvertently offend those most despicable idiots > who insist, inspired in their insistence by American style manuals and a > vague sense of unfounded linguistic superiority, on bafflingly arbitrary > rules on the use of "that" and "which"...)) Ok, we can either give something that is even more jumbled (and an algorithm for generating it), or something at the other extreme as a sudden change in tone, or something along the same lines as if continuing the conversation. You see, mathematicians never actually DO anything - they only talk about how they would do it if they did. (Or we could say something profound, to the consternation of all of those professors who know the author is not one of them.) Are we just trying to show how complex or precise we can be or are we also trying to impress others with the extent of our vocabulary - or is it all simply in jest? Just wondering. C-B > > -- > Aatu Koskensilta (aatu.koskensi...(a)uta.fi) > > "Wovon man nicht sprechan kann, darüber muss man schweigen" > - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
From: Charlie-Boo on 11 May 2010 10:53 On May 11, 9:07 am, Aatu Koskensilta <aatu.koskensi...(a)uta.fi> wrote: > taffer <djr...(a)bath.ac.uk> writes: > > I just had a weird thought. It actually left me confused about what is > > mathematical, and what is physical. The statement was: > > > "Every finite set can be generated by adding one element at a time, > > starting from nothing". > > > This seems to be true. > > Sure. But why should you think it a physical matter? It's a mathematical > triviality. > > -- > Aatu Koskensilta (aatu.koskensi...(a)uta.fi) > > "Wovon man nicht sprechan kann, darüber muss man schweigen" > - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus I was at a party with a few of my Harvard friends a couple of weeks ago (a bunch of graduate students have an apartment about a mile from the square) and an MIT physicist was talking about how they isolated a molecule of sulfur at a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. Then he started talking about his favorite physics puzzles and gave one that he solved at a competition: 3 ants start at vertices of a triangle and each crawls towards the next until they meet in the middle how far do they crawl? I said, Thats not a physics problem. Thats a math problem, like geometry or trig or something. He said yeah, it is, and the discussion turned to what constitutes a math vs. a physics phenomenon. I said that it seems that most all of math is just a model of physics, e.g. addition is the movement of piles of rocks together. He said yeah, but that mathematicians have developed some math for which there is no known physical phenomenon which it models. Then we compared solutions to the ant puzzle and I never got a chance to ask him for an example of a math thing that is not a model of the physical world. (I told them that math is physics without the units and they all laughed. Then I gave the general case of ants on a regular polygon.) C-B
From: Aatu Koskensilta on 11 May 2010 10:54 Charlie-Boo <shymathguy(a)gmail.com> writes: > You see, mathematicians never actually DO anything - they only talk > about how they would do it if they did. A mathematician I know once went to a bar and had a beer. -- Aatu Koskensilta (aatu.koskensilta(a)uta.fi) "Wovon man nicht sprechan kann, dar�ber muss man schweigen" - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
From: Aatu Koskensilta on 11 May 2010 10:57
Charlie-Boo <shymathguy(a)gmail.com> writes: > Then we compared solutions to the ant puzzle and I never got a chance > to ask him for an example of a math thing that is not a model of the > physical world. To pick a logical example, the constructible universe is hardly a model of the physical world. > I told them that math is physics without the units and they all > laughed. Very droll. Ha-ha. -- Aatu Koskensilta (aatu.koskensilta(a)uta.fi) "Wovon man nicht sprechan kann, dar�ber muss man schweigen" - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus |