OT Science And Math Was: Python's Lisp heritage

[John Roth]

"Grant Edwards" <grante at visi.com> wrote in message
news:pUWw8.48099$vm6.7526151 at ruti.visi.com...
> In article <mailman.1019489191.17192.python-list at python.org>,
brueckd at tbye.com wrote:
>
>
> > Second, math *is* an attempt to describe the physical world
>
> In my experience, that's a rather unique opinion, and one not
> held by any of the math type people I've met.

That wasn't true in the past. One of the major problems
with zero was all the people going around saying: show
me zero apples! Or show me -1 oranges. The notion of
mathematics as a conceptual construct that "could" be
useful, but didn't need to be is fairly recent.

Another case in point is Euclid's parallel postulate.
Mathematicians worked on that for two millenia before
Riemann, and several actually had it solved (or at least
the spherical geometry version) and rejected their
solution because "it didn't make sense," that is, they
couldn't wrap their minds around the notion that a
straight line was a closed loop.

John Roth

>