Can math.atan2 return INF?
Steven D'Aprano
steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info
Thu Jun 30 04:24:59 EDT 2016
On Thursday 30 June 2016 12:13, Rustom Mody wrote:
> OTOH Computer Science HAPPENED because mathematicians kept hotly disputing
> for more than ½ a century as to what is legitimate math and what is
> theology/mysticism/etc:
I really don't think so. Computer science happened because people invented
computers and wanted to study them.
What people like Turing did wasn't computer science, because the subject didn't
exist yet. He was too busy creating it to do it.
And as for Kronecker, well, I suspect he objected more to Cantor's infinities
than to real numbers. After all, even the Pythogoreans managed to prove that
sqrt(2) was an irrational number more than 3000 years ago, something Kronecker
must have known.
> In particular the question: "Are real numbers really real?" is where it
> starts off... http://blog.languager.org/2015/03/cs-history-0.html
The pre-history of what later became computer science is very interesting, but
I fear that you are too focused on questions of "mysticism" and not enough on
what those people actually did and said.
For example, you state that Turing "believes in souls" and that he "wishes to
put the soul into the machine" -- what do his religious beliefs have to do with
his work? What evidence do you have for the second claim? What does it even
mean to put "the" soul (is there only one?) into "the" machine?
Besides, the whole point of science is to develop objective, rational reasons
to believe things. The chemist Friedrich Kekulé was inspired to think of
benzene's molecular structure as a ring through a dream in which a snake bit
its own tail, but that's not why we believe benzene is a ring-shaped molecule.
No chemist says "Kekulé dreamed this, therefore it must be true."
The irrational and emotional psychological forces that inspire mathematicians
can make interesting reading, but they have no relevance in deciding who is
write or wrong. No numbers are real. All numbers are abstractions, not concrete
things. If there is a universe of Platonic forms -- highly unlikely, as the
concept is intellectually simplistic and implausible -- we don't live in it.
Since all numbers are abstractions, the Real sqrt(2) is no more, or less,
"real" than the integer 2.
--
Steve
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