Re: [FRIAM] FW: Math emojis

[Nick Thompson]

Thanks, Lee.

 

See larding below. 

 

 

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 6:53 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Math emojis

 

Nick:

> 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."

 

I don't claim to be a native speaker of PhysicsEng, much less of EconoEng,
but I've frequently hung out with some of the former, and I've always seen
it stated "Assume a spherical cow".

  Further, if either of those one-liners were to be expanded to a longer
joke-about-jargon-and/or-idealization, my strong intuition suggests that
they would have to be expanded to something along the lines of "Let X be a
spherical cow", "Let C be a fully informed consumer", followed by some
fanciful bloviation (or bovination) about X and C, using fancy jargon (or
pseudojargon; for instance, somewhere around here I have a very old
photocopy of a parody astrophysics article, typeset in the style of--I
believe--the Astrophysical Review, purporting to be "On the Imperturbability
of Elevator Operators" by Chandrasekharan: the joke in the title rests on
the facts that "operators" and "perturbation" are standard jargon in
mathematical physics, and could quite reasonably appear near each other in
MathPhysEng, but "elevator operators" is just a bit of slapstick).  Just
plain "Let there be", without providing a place-holding name for the assumed
cow or consumer, rings very false.  But (as before) this is empirical stuff,
and if you've really heard them that way (and can prove it...), then they
can occur that way and my skepticism is unwarranted.  On the other hand, if
you're *recreating* the material in quotation marks *as a representation of
what you understood to be the joke*, then I think you're in the position of
the (typically) British man who, in a meta-joke, tries to re-tell an
American joke and gets it hilariously wrong.

[NST==>Oh, well.  I tried.  In my defrocked English-Majory sort of way, I
find it hard to see the difference between "Assume a." and "Let there be."
I guess perhaps the latter has more of an order of Bible-speak, as we would
say in Lee-Speak.  <==nst] 

 

> 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."

 

Well, we do have the proverb "Many a true word is spoken in jest", and
"kidding on the square" is an old and honorable idiom, whereas "kidding on
the square of the hypotenuse" is just a quip, and "kidding on the
hypothesis" might be a translation of "Hypothesis non fingo" but not a very
good one. From your point of view as a pragmatist (Jamesian or Pierceian,
take your pick), what should it *matter* whether we can or can't "tell the
jokes from the foundational insights"?  J: an insight that sees no
inwardness is no insight. P:

If something (a discourse fragment; a stone; a dream--well, not one of
those, in your case) is a "foundational insight", that will (eventually) be
found to be the case *because it became a foundation of something* in the
long run.  If something is a "joke", *that* will (eventually) be found to be
the case because it made you laugh, most often--but not always--in the short
run (and, yes, I have at least several times in my life suddenly "gotten" a
joke decades after hearing or seeing or reading it, as I bet you have, too;
conversely, I've more than several times realized that something an earlier
"I" found to be a real side-splitter wasn't funny at all).

[NST==> Well, you absolutely correct about all of the above.  In the Knewton
Kneeslapper case, I have built my career on criticizing category errors in
biology and psychology, and if "acceleration at an instant" isn't a category
error, I don't know wtf a category error is.  Seems like all of higher math
is based on category errors.  So we calculate the acceleration at a point,
and then we do all sorts of operations with it, and then we build a bridge
with those calculations and the damned bridge 

Re: [FRIAM] FW: Math emojis

[lrudolph]

Nick:
> 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."

I don't claim to be a native speaker of PhysicsEng, much less of EconoEng,
but I've frequently hung out with some of the former, and I've always seen
it stated "Assume a spherical cow".  Further, if either of those
one-liners were to be expanded to a longer
joke-about-jargon-and/or-idealization, my strong intuition suggests that
they would have to be expanded to something along the lines of "Let X be a
spherical cow", "Let C be a fully informed consumer", followed by some
fanciful bloviation (or bovination) about X and C, using fancy jargon (or
pseudojargon; for instance, somewhere around here I have a very old
photocopy of a parody astrophysics article, typeset in the style of--I
believe--the Astrophysical Review, purporting to be "On the
Imperturbability  of Elevator Operators" by Chandrasekharan: the joke in
the title rests on the facts that "operators" and "perturbation" are
standard jargon in mathematical physics, and could quite reasonably appear
near each other in MathPhysEng, but "elevator operators" is just a bit of
slapstick).  Just plain "Let there be", without providing a place-holding
name for the assumed cow or consumer, rings very false.  But (as before)
this is empirical stuff, and if you've really heard them that way (and can
prove it...), then they can occur that way and my skepticism is
unwarranted.  On the other hand, if you're *recreating* the material in
quotation marks *as a representation of what you understood to be the
joke*, then I think you're in the position of the (typically) British man
who, in a meta-joke, tries to re-tell an American joke and gets it
hilariously wrong.

> 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."

Well, we do have the proverb "Many a true word is spoken in jest", and
"kidding on the square" is an old and honorable idiom, whereas "kidding on
the square of the hypotenuse" is just a quip, and "kidding on the
hypothesis" might be a translation of "Hypothesis non fingo" but not a
very good one. From your point of view as a pragmatist (Jamesian or
Pierceian, take your pick), what should it *matter* whether we can or
can't "tell the jokes from the foundational insights"?  J: an insight that
sees no inwardness is no insight. P:
If something (a discourse fragment; a stone; a dream--well, not one of
those, in your case) is a "foundational insight", that will (eventually)
be found to be the case *because it became a foundation of something* in
the long run.  If something is a "joke", *that* will (eventually) be found
to be the case because it made you laugh, most often--but not always--in
the short run (and, yes, I have at least several times in my life suddenly
"gotten" a joke decades after hearing or seeing or reading it, as I bet
you have, too; conversely, I've more than several times realized that
something an earlier "I" found to be a real side-splitter wasn't funny at
all).






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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] FW: Math emojis

[Carl Tollander]

Well, the emoji post is from a blog of a math grad student trying to make
sense of her existence as a math grad student and trying to explain
concepts simply.  I recommend noodling around her "other" posts...Baez
recommended her blog.

On Wed, Jan 30, 2019, 17:57 Nick Thompson  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 
> 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 variant

Re: [FRIAM] FW: Math emojis

[Nick Thompson]

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 
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 

Re: [FRIAM] FW: Math emojis

[lrudolph]

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






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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] FW: Math emojis

[Dean Gerber]

 "For every  epsilon > 0, there exists a delta such that ..."
On Wednesday, January 30, 2019, 12:09:18 PM MST, Nick Thompson 
 wrote:  
 
 #yiv1319290627 #yiv1319290627 -- _filtered #yiv1319290627 {panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 
4 6 3 2 4;} _filtered #yiv1319290627 {font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 
4 3 2 4;}#yiv1319290627 #yiv1319290627 p.yiv1319290627MsoNormal, #yiv1319290627 
li.yiv1319290627MsoNormal, #yiv1319290627 div.yiv1319290627MsoNormal 
{margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:New 
serif;}#yiv1319290627 a:link, #yiv1319290627 span.yiv1319290627MsoHyperlink 
{color:blue;text-decoration:underline;}#yiv1319290627 a:visited, #yiv1319290627 
span.yiv1319290627MsoHyperlinkFollowed 
{color:purple;text-decoration:underline;}#yiv1319290627 
span.yiv1319290627EmailStyle17 
{font-family:sans-serif;color:#1F497D;}#yiv1319290627 
.yiv1319290627MsoChpDefault {font-family:sans-serif;} _filtered #yiv1319290627 
{margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;}#yiv1319290627 div.yiv1319290627WordSection1 
{}#yiv1319290627 
Alright.  I’ll bite.  Why (or how) is “Let epsilon < 0” a joke?  

  

n

  

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

  

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2019 11:18 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: [FRIAM] Math emojis

  

https://www.math3ma.com/blog/math-emojis

  

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[FRIAM] FW: Math emojis

[Nick Thompson]

Alright.  I’ll bite.  Why (or how) is “Let epsilon < 0” a joke?  

 

n

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

  
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2019 11:18 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: [FRIAM] Math emojis

 

https://www.math3ma.com/blog/math-emojis

 


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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