On 2 May, 2007, at 5:30 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
On May 2, 2007, at 5:18 PM, ravi wrote:
Who *is* Julia Robinson!!!? Why the cheek! ;-)
Julia Robinson was one of the most important mathematicians/logicians
of the 20th century.
I always suspected that I have no idea what mathematicians do. Then I
read a bit about Julia Robinson, and my worst fears are confirmed.
None of it made any sense to me. Makes Lacan read like McGuffey's.
Well yes, it may not make sense at the outset, but mathematics and
the doing of it, is the easiest to learn/understand by its very
nature of atomic inferential progression. If you read about her you
probably learnt that she contributed the major part (the other
contributors being Martin Davis, a few blocks away from your office,
Putnam, and a young fellow named Matjasevich) to resolving Hilbert's
10th: the question of whether there is a procedure for determining if
polynomial equations have integer solutions. Note that the question
is not about solving a particular equation, but of whether a general
procedure or algorithm can answer the question of solving to integer
values. And the answer is "No", there isn't! Even if you do not
follow the math of it, what an interesting result!
I have no idea who McGuffey is, and I know that Lacan is vilified by
the anti-pomo crowd. Irrespective of that, I believe you are missing
out one of the most fundamentally beautiful human activities by
dismissing (from your scope of knowledge) the doing of mathematics
prematurely!
--ravi
