The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
The Forum - On Line Opinion's article discussion area



Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Main Articles General

Sign In      Register

The Forum > General Discussion > Is Maths a science or human belief system?

Is Maths a science or human belief system?

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. ...
  6. 5
  7. 6
  8. 7
  9. Page 8
  10. All
cloa513: Your example of comparing 10 grain of sand to 1 boulder doesn't add any weight to your claim that maths is neither a science nor a human belief system.

However, I don't dispute that maths certainly has a precise and (almost) unambiguous language intrinsically associated with it that is used to convey meaning between working mathematicians.

By-the-way maths has a branch specifically related to handling statements like the example you gave-- it's called type theory. In computer science type systems form a major part (in my opinion the most important part) of programming language theory. An everyday example of type theory in action is the common statement that "you can't add/compare apples to oranges". see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_theory for more info.

Additionally, it might interest you to know that maths includes the study of formal grammar systems as a field of study. Most people are surprised to find that this is actually a field of mathematical study since they normally associate grammar with English studies/Literature at school. In fact some grammar systems are extremely powerful mathematically- an important result of grammar systems theory is that there exists a grammar which is Turing complete: ie, there are grammars which can be used to "compute" *any* mathematical statement. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_grammar
Posted by thinkabit, Monday, 30 November 2015 9:30:26 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. ...
  6. 5
  7. 6
  8. 7
  9. Page 8
  10. All

About Us :: Search :: Discuss :: Feedback :: Legals :: Privacy