Devon McCormick <devonmcc <at> gmail.com> writes: > > You're welcome. I would urge you to experiment more and theorize less -
This suggestion has been made many times by many, many people. Even Roger picked on me about wanting the exact algorithm for rank by making an analogy to the use of a car versus driving it. Question 1 - how does one learn mathematics? Playing around with examples is OK, but a Ph.D in math made it clear to me that in all cases, the definition is God. It's OK to get an idea by playing around with things, but that is just an idea, the definition has final say-so. So, likewise, learning J should be like following a proof in a textbook, right? But then again, math is limited by Goedel's Incompleteness theorem whereas computers can do more? == extended melodrama below == I am of the opinion that proof is the central concept to math and computation comes as a nice side effect. Those who can prove things have no problem computing, but the opposite is not the case. When I taught English in Taiwan, I forced my students to learn to write and speak on the premise that those can control the active aspect of the language can read and listen with no problem. Now, I never was a great mathematician and I think the reason is that I did not take time to fully understand everything at theoretical level. blah, blah, blah.... or make that: 3 # 'blah' NB. or something like that ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
