Re: Platonism

tchow_at_lsa.umich.edu
Date: 03/09/05 

Date: 09 Mar 2005 15:23:52 GMT

In article <d0l42c$d7l$1@usenet.cso.niu.edu>,
Neil W Rickert <rickert+nn@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>I'm reminded of when a former colleague considered writing a graduate
>text in number theory. He wanted to title it "Elementary Arithmetic".

I seem to remember that Hardy and Wright were going to title their book
"An Introduction to Arithmetic" before they thought better of it.

It's quite amusing to me that mathematicians use a lot of words differently
even from, say, engineers. Jacobson's books "Basic Algebra I" and "Basic
Algebra II" are not written for middle-schoolers. When an engineer says
that he's going to do some analysis, or says he wants an analytic expression
for something, he doesn't usually mean what a mathematician means by
analysis. When a communications engineer talks about the topology of a
network, what he has in mind is only a tiny corner of what mathematicians
call topology, and it's not even a faithful rendering of that corner. Even
the term "hard problem" is subtly different. Typically the engineer's "hard
problem" has plenty of known solutions---it's just that they're costly or
have serious limitations. 

-- 
Tim Chow       tchow-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu
The range of our projectiles---even ... the artillery---however great, will
never exceed four of those miles of which as many thousand separate us from
the center of the earth.  ---Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences

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