"If no human can check a proof of a theorem, does it really count as mathematics? That's the intriguing question raised by the latest computer-assisted proof. It is as large as the entire content of Wikipedia, making it unlikely that will ever be checked by a human being."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25068-wikipediasize-maths-proof-too-big-for-humans-to-check.html#.UwTytEJdV69 This reminded me of something that Bruno mentions frequently: the idea of deriving physics from the natural numbers, addition and multiplication. Should we expect wikipedia-size proofs (or worse)? Cheers, Telmo. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
