Science And Math Was: Python's Lisp heritage

[Siegfried Gonzi]

Fernando Pérez wrote:

> Sorry but no. The fact that certain physical problems may have served as
> inspiration for some mathematical developments can be considered to be purely
> accidental. The foundational structure of mathematics is entirely one of
> logical self consistency, and massive amounts of work was done particularly
> in the 20th century to build that framework. While it is true that up to the
> 19th century most (if not all) significant advances in math were prompted by
> challenges from the physical sciences, the work of the formalists in the 20th
> century showed that mathematics could be built entirely on an abstract,
> logical foundation.

This is true, fo example even the tensor analysis ("Ricci") has been
formalized 1850 long before Hilbert (though, who did let go Einstein
first) made the conncetion to Einstein's theory of relativity.

Or, Maxwell's equations first came without any tensor analysis
formulation. This has been added/reformulated later.

This remembers me on a professor who asked me (for a certificate): "What
do you know about Maxwell's equations". I started to write  it
mathematically down, but he then stopped me and said: "We are doing
physics and not math now". I just had it to explain verbally.

S. Gonzi