http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/mathml/index.html
i was trying to find the publication date and context, but didn't find it last time after a couple min. Yesterday, on rereading, i did. The article in question is: « Mathematical Notation: Past and Future (2000) Stephen Wolfram October 20, 2000 Transcript of a keynote address presented at MathML and Math on the Web: MathML International Conference 2000 » so, it's a speech for MathML conf in 2000. so, this explains the error on the plimpton 322. The latest discovery on that is published in 2002 and later. the date of this speech also explains parts of the writings about some mysterious “fundamental science work”, which now we know is his controversial book A New Kind Of Science (2002). Xah ∑ http://xahlee.org/ ☄ ---------------------- Xah Lee wrote: Personally, particular interesting info i've learned is that, for all my trouble in the past decade expressing problems of traditional math notation, i learned from his article this single-phrase summary: “traditional math notation lacks a grammar”. The article is somewhat disappointing though. I was expecting he'd go into some details about the science of math notations, or, as he put it aptly: “linguistics of math notations”. However, he didn't touch the subject, except saying that it haven't been studied. upon a more detailed reading of Stephen's article, i discovered some errors. On this page:http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/mathml/ mathml2.html he mentions the Plimpton 322 tablet. It is widely taught in math history books, that this table is pythagorean triples. On reading his article, i wanted to refresh my understanding of the subject, so i looked up Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322 and behold! apparantly, in recent academic publications, it is suggested that this is not pythagorean triples, but rather: “a list of regular reciprocal pairs”. Xah ∑http://xahlee.org/ ☄ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list