[lit-ideas] Re: math question
- From: "Adriano Palma" <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2012 08:15:44 +0200
** Low Priority **
** Reply Requested by 4/9/2012 (Monday) **
the sequence has nothing surprising (take a look at terry tao's work if
you like surprises)
? נכון
>>> Julie Krueger <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx> 09/04/2012 01:19 AM >>>
So from all this I take it that no one can, in fact, explain the why of
the math sequence?
Julie Krueger
On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Donal McEvoy
<donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: Walter C. Okshevsky <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
>As I must constantly remind my grad and doctoral students, your
"principal" is
your pal at school. (Kant's Categorical Imperative is not your pal.)
There's an
interesting psychological phenomenon lurking here somewhere I believe,
given the
frequency of the mistake amongst relatively highly educated people.
Alas, I am
not a psychologist.>
But Julie may not have been making this mistake but simply using her
own compressed notation, a la Wittgenstein [where 'pro' may mean
'proposition' and not 'for'], so that "if it's a symptom of how humans
talk about numbers, or reflects some mathematical principal." uses
"principal." as an abbreviation of "principality", and so this is
Julie's way of raising the age-old question of whether what we take as
mathematical truths are merely the result of human convention or reflect
some further reality or realm such as might be thought of as the
"mathematical principality". Alas, I am not a psychologist and do not
know why professors do not consider these possibilities before wading in
to point out alleged errors, but given the frequency with which they do
there must be an interestg psych. phenom. lurkg here. Indeed, having
often put this to the test in my examinations, it never once seems to
have occurred to them that I was making some kind of joke when what I
said appeared merely facile in its expression, like when I said the
problem with K's 'Categorical Imperative' is that it is neither
categorical nor imperative nor Kant's. So another possibility is that
Julie is making a joke by using "principal" instead of "principle". Good
one, Julie.
D
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