Saturday, December 18, 2010
"The only point of learning to do this kind of thing is really as a mental exercise, as a way of showing how smart you are."
Tecs, how come you told me this crap is important?
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Typical problems they worked on involved calculating the area of a given field, or the width of a trench. These problems, says Jones, required the kind of math training taught to American Grade 10 students.
Sighhh... So how do you compute the length of a trench? Could it be you just walk along it, and count steps? Nahhh... You need gerbes.
"It's not like algebra, it's all written out in words and numerals but no symbols and no times signs or equals or anything like that," he said.
Where are the CDs?
"As a teacher of mathematics, it's very interesting to see how they organized their material. There's still interesting things to learn from cutting-edge pedagogy 4,000 years ago."
AA, take note.
What did they think about sexual harassment back then?
Measure the trench, they said.
What do you expect from a random CNN hack?
So the Babylonians were proto-physicists and the Greeks were proto-\CDers.
Wow, that sucks for the good guys...
So who are the good guys? Methinks, figuring out what's a definition, what's a hypothesis, what's an implication, what's a proof, etc, is more important than any kind of bs measurement. No way a pea-brained CNN hack could comprehend that.
Neither could Archimedes or Newton, the two greatest mathematicians of all time.
You're full of Rot, Herr Rott. Archimedes and Newton were full of care for hypothesis, implication, definition, proof. Which is one reason why they were so much damn better than almost all those around 'em. They also liked measurements, true enough, but they did not confuse these with proof.
Nonsense. Let's see you defend Euler like that!
Hey -- Sir Isaac defined the derivative. And the Newton polytope. And figured out the Newton-Puiseux series. And the Newton method. And the binomial formula. And stated a bunch of Laws. Does any of this compare to the pesky measurements he made in opticks or whatever? No way, Josay.
He didn't know what a limit is, Tecs!
He's a Babylonian!
OK, so he didn't have the precise notion of limit. Bfd. But he defined the Newton quotient. Good enough for me.
He was the greatest ever, probably. But he didn't prove shit.
Well, he did prove Kepler's second law, didn't he?
Which proves, once more, that you owe me a pint of hoppy brew. Badly.
Who knew that planets' ornits were polygons?!
This must warm your \CD heart, Tecs! No \partial, no \lesssim....
It's true. Newton didn't prove shit. For the proof of shit we had to wait until the coming of Herr Rott.
Last time I send you preprints, scrotoid.
Spite, Herr Rott, is the mother of all proofs.
And you are the poof of all poofs!
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