Re: Historical CAS question

From: Robert Israel (israel_at_math.ubc.ca)
Date: 01/23/05 

Date: 23 Jan 2005 03:41:22 GMT

In article <u3DId.5602$IW4.114976@news2.e.nsc.no>,
Martin Johansen <m***@online.no> wrote:

>Mathematics, being the science of measurement, is about reducing a
>complicated task into mans comprehension, i.e. somthing that can be written
>down on a piece of paper and comprehended all at once.

Maybe a very large piece of paper...

>Today, Gauss would not achieve this. Another student would have been thought
>how to use Maple and the computer would do the calculation for him. All the
>students would laugh at Gauss who obviously overcomplicated things.

Gauss loved calculation. We can only dream of what he could have
accomplished if computers had been available.

>But, the problem is, Gauss' solution leads the way to infinite sums, which
>the computer cannot do.

This last is a ridiculous statement, especially in this newsgroup.

>So my conclusion is, a CAS is unnecessary or damaging for mathematicians
>because it does not inspire reasoning, which is easily more powerfull than
>any CAS.

A CAS is not a substitute for human reasoning, but it is a very powerful
tool when used together with reasoning.

>For mathematics, use pen and paper, and for *unavoidably* repetetive tasks
>use a CAS, e.g. if you final answer is 5^log(2) and you only need an
>approximation.

Nonsense. Clearly you have no idea of what a CAS does.

Robert Israel israel@math.ubc.ca
Department of Mathematics http://www.math.ubc.ca/~israel
University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada

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