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fl

Yes, sir

"A computer program is a piece of literature." Knuth (Mathematical writing p.21)

A hot opinion

David Hilbert soutenait le point de vue formaliste où les résultats devaient être dérivés selon les règles d' une syntaxe mécanique. Des entreprises telles que le projet metamath[55] ou le projet Ghilbert,[56] peuvent donner une idée de cette recherche d'une perfection glacée.source

David Hilbert upheld the formalist point of view according to which results should be derived using the rules of a mechanical syntax. Projects such as Metamath or Ghilbert can give an idea of such a research for a chilly perfection.

The Supreme Fascist

"Erdos believed that God, whom he called the SF (for Supreme Fascist), had an infinitely long Book that contained the most elegant proofs of all mathematical theorems. His colleagues depended on him to produce proofs "straight from the Book." The SF Was always tormenting; Erdos, by hiding his glasses, stealing his plane tickets, or, worst of all, keeping to Himself the, pages of the Book." – Paul Hoffman

An algorithmic success

.>> We can wonder if a human being would be able to produce an .>> algorithmic source of uncertainness.

.> Windows 95 is a success in this respect.

. – Filh fr.sci.psychanalyse

A conjecture

I think sex is more interesting than logic, but I can't prove it. – Linux . fortune

Mathematic according to Grothendieck

Quand je pense à "la mathématique", ce n’est sûrement pas à la totalité du savoir qu’on peut qualifier de "mathématique", consigné de l’antiquité à nos jours, dans des publications, des preprints ou des manuscrits et correspondances. Même en éliminant les répétitions, ça doit faire sans doute quelques millions de pages de texte compact ; une dizaine de tonnes de bouquins peut-être, ou encore quelques milliers de volumes épais, de quoi remplir une spacieuse bibliothèque : rien de quoi faire bander c’est sûr, bien au contraire. – Grothendieck. Récoltes et semailles p. 545.

When I think to "mathematic", it's certainly not to the totality of the knowledge we can qualify of "mathematical", recorded from the antiquity to our days in books, preprints, manuscripts or correspondences. Even if we remove repetitions, it must certainly represent several millions of pages of compact text; ten or so tons of books perhaps, or some thousands of thick volumes, enough to fill up a large library: nothing that makes you have a hard-on, that's sure.

A hack

I was talking about this with Bram, and he called ZF set theory a "hack." I more or less agree, but playing with it in the context of Metamath has led me to appreciate how powerful a hack it is. With a small number of relatively simple axioms, it gets you a rich set of infinities, but avoids the particular ones that bring the whole formal system crumbling down. You get integers, reals, tuples, sequences (finite and infinite), transfinites, and functions from set to set. You don't get untyped lambda calculus. Overall, it's probably a good tradeoff. – Raph Levien's blog 27 Aug 2002

Intimidation

When a mathematician writes a text, he has to take good care in order to convince others of his ideas. He has an arsenal of techniques to do so: by precise formulation, by the use of natural language and mathematical symbols, and by the use of a well-ordered lay-out. A mathematical text can also convince a reader by pure intimidation: a proof of a proposition can be that difficult or impressive that a reader simply takes it for granted. – G. Geleijnse Comparing two user-friendly formal languages for mathematics: Weak Type Theory and Mizar p. 1.

French mathematicians and word war I

The devastation of World War I presented a unique challenge to aspiring mathematicians of the mid 1920's. Among the many casualties of the war were great numbers of scientists and mathematicians who would at this time have been serving as mentors to the young students. Whereas other countries such as Germany were sending their scholars to do scientific work, France was sending promising young students to the front. A war-time directory of the école Normale Supérieure in Paris confirms that about 2/3 of their student population was killed in the war.[DJ] Young men studying after the war had no young teachers, they had no previous generation to rely on for guidance. What did this mean? According to Jean Dieudonné, it meant that students like him were missing out on important discoveries and advances being made in mathematics at that time. He explained : “I am not saying that they (the older professors) did not teach us excellent mathematics (…) But it is indubitable that a 50 year old mathematician knows the mathematics he learned at 20 or 30, but has only notions, often rather vague, of the mathematics of his epoch, i.e. the period of time when he is 50.” He continued : “I had graduated from the école Normale and I did not know what an ideal was! This gives you and idea of what a young French mathematician knew in 1930.”[DJ] Henri Cartan, another student in Paris shortly after the war affirmed : “we were the first generation after the war. Before us there was a vide, a vacuum, and it was necessary to make everything new.”[JA] This is exactly what a few young Parisian math students set out to do. – PlanetMath article Nicolas Bourbaki

A disappointment

There is a romance associated with these conjectures [ Berge's conjectures about perfect graphs ] that is unparalleled in the contemporary history of graph theory. Berge first announced these twin conjectures at a European conference in 1960, and first wrote them down only in 1963 in a paper surprisingly published at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, where Berge was a frequent visitor for about two decades. The brilliant Laszlo Lovász, who was first ‘spotted’ by the legendary Paul Erdös on one of his customary visits to Hungarian high schools to look for nascent talent, resolved the easier conjecture in 1971. Sadly, Lovász’s triumph ended the career of D. R. Fulkerson, who was within a whisker of proving the conjecture himself till he decided that the conjecture was false and started looking for counter-examples. When Fulkerson received a postcard from Berge informing him of Lovász’s proof, he completed his own proof in a matter of hours! A defeated Fulkerson only lived a few more months; just long enough to gracefully acknowledge in a Math Prog paper that Lovász was the deserving winner. – Obituary of Berge by S. Bhogle

Beyond this limit, theres's only private stuff

Topology without tears: http://uob-community.ballarat.edu.au/~smorris/topology.htm

http://www.emis.de/journals/BAMV/conten/vol9/jeanyves.pdf

http://www.iecn.u-nancy.fr/~eguether/archives/bibliographie_Bourbaki.pdf

Topology history: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Topology_in_mathematics.html

http://www.halfvalue.com/textbooks-list.htm#Topics_in_mathematics

Filters for betginners

http://at.yorku.ca/cgi-bin/bbqa?forum=ask_a_topologist_2002;task=show_msg;msg=0172

A review of Hausdorff's Grundzüge der Mengenlehre

http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183425494

http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183492349

Categories

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~jlp/po.category.pdf

http://folli.loria.fr/cds/1999/library/pdf/barrwells.pdf

http://www.math.uu.nl/people/jvoosten/syllabi/catsmoeder.pdf

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week73.html

Programming

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Category_theory

Writing

http://tex.loria.fr/typographie/mathwriting.pdf

Deletion

To delete a page place "DeletedPage?" with a ! in front of the D.

My sandbox

fl's sandbox

Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics

A very impressive site: http://members.aol.com/jeff570/mathword.html