Well, Ok. I can see that it's sort of like Carl Tollander's "Let there be a spherical cow," which always makes me smile.
Or Even the micro economists', "Let there be a fully informed consumer." But how do we tell the jokes from the foundational insights: Like: "Let there be a number which when multiplied by itself equals -1. Or that howler of mathematical howlers: "Think of a number greater than any number you can think of." Or Knewton's Knee-slapper: "Calculate the acceleration at an instant." Bridges built and airplanes flown on gales of laughter. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of lrudo...@meganet.net Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2019 3:10 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Math emojis The joke (such as it is) is a discourse joke, playing upon the fact (incontestable to all fluent writers/speakers of MathEng, i.e., mathematicians' English) that the fragment of MathEng "For every \epsilon < 0" is perfectly well formed both syntactically and semantically, but violates the established pragmatics of MathEng. (Excuse the TeX, but when I try to paste the Greek letter epsilon into this window, hijinx ensue; imagine it's there, instead of \epsilon.) [Added before mailing: it occurs to me that you, as an expert on "pragmatism", may not be familiar with the linguists' term-of-art "pragmatics", which I learned long ago from my daughter Susanna, whom you met in Santa Fe. The first definition Google gives is what I mean: "the branch of linguistics dealing with language in use and the contexts in which it is used, including such matters as deixis, the taking of turns in conversation, text organization, presupposition, and implicature." In particular, the "joke" in question depends on presuppositions and implicatures.] Even as a hopeless non-fluent occasional witness of MathEng, Nick, you can easily acquire evidence in favor of my claim about syntax by browsing mathematical papers for fragments of the form "For every [glyph] < [glyph]" until you are convinced of the proposition that the MathEng discourse community accepts such a fragment as well-formed. With perhaps more work than you can be expected to do, you might also acquire evidence in favor of my claim about semantics by browsing for contexts that convince you of several propositions about MathEng: (1) very generally, the glyph (here expanded as) \epsilon is used in MathEng to denote a "real number"; (2) the glyph 0, in both MathEng and colloquial English, is used to denote the (real) number zero; (3) the glyph < is used in MathEng to denote a relationship that two real numbers may or may not bear to each other, namely, the string of glyphs p < q is used to denote that p is less than (and not equal to) q; (4) there *are* real numbers less than 0; ... and perhaps more; whence "For every \epsilon < 0" is a meaningful fragment of MathEng. *However*, without sufficient exposure to MathEng discourses (and certainly exposure more than you have had, or would tolerate having in the present or future) it would be unlikely that you could figure out on your own that IN PRESENT PRACTICE within the MathEng discourse community all the following propositions are true. (A) The glyph \epsilon is nearly always used to denote a "small" real number (or an "arbitrary" real number that "becomes" small), where in the context of "the real number system" (among others) "small" means "close to 0". (B) More specifically, in many (but not all) such contexts, "small" means "close to 0 BUT LARGER THAN 0". (C) The most common context of type (B)--at least for mathematics students and most, but probably not all, more fully-fledged Working Mathematicians)--are the MathEng discourse fragments "For every \epsilon > 0", "For every sufficiently small \epsilon > 0", and their variants with "every" replaced by "all". [This is an empirical claim. I have not done anything to test it (although if you have read those Book Fragments I sent you, you will see there several examples where I *have* accumulated strong empirical evidence, from exhaustive queries of extensive corpora of MathEng, for other claims about MathEng: which should convince you, I hope, that my MathEng intuitions are not invariably pulled out of my ass). I will bet you a shiny new dime that it's true.] THEREFORE, in the actually existing community of contemporary fluent users of MathEng, the syntactically and semantically impeccable fragment "For every \epsilon < 0" is pragmatically defective: nobody would say that! If that hasn't explained any slightest \epsilon of humor out of the joke, I don't know why not. Perhaps you could respond with a Peircean analysis of the semiotics of the joke, and *really* kill it dead. Lee ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
