[Wittrs] Fwd: [Math 2.0] Adjectives and Nouns

kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx> · Sun, 4 Mar 2012 08:57:24 -0500

From another list on which I participate, this post from michel paul,
a colleague Pythonic Math teacher practicing in Beverly Hills (CA).

What stands out for me in the quote from Frege below is the somewhat
aphoristic dissection of what we'd call "language games".  That's not
exactly how he thought of what he was doing, but for my part I better
appreciate his influence on Wittgenstein from quotes such as this.
It's been awhile since I looked at Frege's writings.

I've been reading through '(Over)interpreting Wittgenstein'
http://www.amazon.com/Over-Interpreting-Wittgenstein-A-Biletzki/dp/1402013272/

on flights from Portland to Chicago to Philadelphia.  I'm "a member of
the corporation" as we put it, said corporation being the American
Friends Service Committee.
http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2012/03/corporation-meeting.html

More about that later (flying back to Portland today -- more reading).

Kirby

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: michel paul <pythonic.math@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 10:53 PM
Subject: Re: [Math 2.0] Adjectives and Nouns
To: mathfuture@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Here is something pertinent from Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic:

Is it not in totally different senses that we speak of a tree as
having 1000 leaves and again as having green leaves? The green color
we ascribe to each single leaf, but not the number 1000. If we call
all the leaves of a tree taken together its foliage, then the foliage
too is green but it is not 1000. To what then does the property 1000
really belong?
...
If I give someone a stone with the words: Find the weight of this, I
have given him precisely the object he is to investigate. But if I
place a pile of playing cards in his hands with the words: Find the
number of these, this does not tell him whether I wish to know the
number of cards, or of complete packs of cards, or even say of points
in the game of skat.
...
It marks, therefore, an important difference between color and number,
that a color such as blue belongs to a surface independently of any
choice of ours.
...
The number 1, on the other hand, or 100 or any other number, cannot be
said to belong to the pile of playing cards in its own right, but at
most to belong to it in view of the way in which we have chosen to
regard it, and even then not in such a way that we can simply assign
the number to it as a predicate.

- Michel

On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 4:12 AM, Maria Droujkova <droujkova@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 9:38 PM, <apapert54@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> I decided many years ago that a major obstacles to understanding mathematics 
>> and, as a result, science is the understanding that numbers are like 
>> adjectives, only infinitely malleable, in that they only become concrete 
>> when attached to an object (noun).
>
>
> Wow, this is profound. It reminds me of the studies of tribal people who have 
> different words for "three fish" and "three people" and "three pigs" for 
> example. We had a Math Future event about it:
> http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/PierrePica
>
> I think the metaphor of "adjective" is very powerful.
>
> Cheers,
> MariaD
>
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--
===================================
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

- Richard Feynman
===================================
"Computer science is the new mathematics."

- Dr. Christos Papadimitriou
===================================

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[Wittrs] Fwd: [Math 2.0] Adjectives and Nouns

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