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From: Burton Samograd <kruhft@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: alt.languages.english
Subject: Re: Has anyone made equations out of English sentences?
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 18:34:15 -0600
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Chris Croughton <chris@keristor.net> writes:
> On Wed, 10 May 2006 10:25:18 -0600, Burton Samograd
> <kruhft@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Chris Croughton <chris@keristor.net> writes:
>>
>> Try looking at LaTeX (actually TeX, but LaTeX is a much easier to
>> manage subset of the TeX language). It was designed for creating print
>> ready documents and is the standard tool for mathematicians
>> typesetting equations, papers and documents. It's generally not
>> WYSIWYG, but when combined with the emacs editor and specific LaTeX
>> packages, you can get a very powerful document and equation editor.
>
> I know LaTeX (and InfoTeX, and MusiTeX), but it isn't a font which can
> be used with a news client, which was the point. Messages could be
> posted in Unicode (or preferably UTF-8) which could convey the
> appropriate characters but few people would be able to display them (and
> my Xterms will only handle Latin-1 anyway).
Sorry, I must have missed the point :) I thought he (you? sorry, can't
see the original post) was asking for a way to typesetting
mathematics. I also have been trying to solve the problem of
displaying Unicode/UTF-8 with some success, but I mostly live in the
linux console (by choice) and there's an even greater number of of
twisty passages to follow on trying to get that problem solved.
Firefox and newer systems seem to be able to display multibyte
characters ok, as well as MathML, although I'm sure about the
newsclient.
>> Although this doesn't help in the general case of writing by everyone,
>> it does help in the specific case of creating documents for reading by
>> others.
>
> I would be surprised if the major technical text preparation packages
> (I'm not includinf MS Word in those!) couldn't handle the extra
> characters, and for most people they are easier than the TeX
> variants.
Yes, they would be easier I agree, but early ease of use leads to later
hitting limits and frustration, IMHO.
>> Pick up a book discreet mathematics, they cover all of these things
>> and they are pretty cheap since they're a standard course in most
>> science curriculums.
>
> Depends where you are whether you can get textbooks cheaply. In the UK
> they tend to be a lot more expensive than fiction books of the same
> size...
I just go to the library and haven't bought a textbook in 10 years...
>> Yes, it's very easy to create meaningless (as in having no true or
>> false value) sentances using any language (even symbolic logic and
>> mathematics).
>
> The thing is that "time flies like an arrow" is not meaningless, its
> syntax is just ambiguous, because English syntax (and that of other
> natural languages) has grown organically and hasn't been designed.
> Lojban and a few other created languages are unambiguous, but few people
> speak those and even fewer do so in normal conversation or writing.
I would not say the syntax is ambiguous in that sentance, but the
schemantics is. Logical languages do not included the a term 'like';
the evaluation of a word in an expression has to have an unambiguous
value to give it truth value or meaning (as in computer lanaguages).
That sentance 'does not compute', but it does make sense and have
meaning.
We understand the sentence because we are not computers (aka logic
machines). Some of us find logic very appealing, but it is not
'natural' in the sense of we are naturally born that way; logic was a
creation of man that we are taught. And yes, unambiguous languages
are very difficult to converse and write in but they are possible to
define and analyse, which is of interest to linguists that are trying
to analyse natural languages.
>> Mathematics is about finding and eliminating those
>> practices in the search of obtaining 'truth' (or at least truthful
>> axioms from which a 'real' version of truth can be built). Of course,
>> there is always a measure of faith (see Godel's Incompleteness
>> Theorem, The Halting Problem, or the various other limits to logical
>> truth and knowledge that have been found in other fields of study)
>> that is required before truth is accepted though, so really, nothing
>> can be proven to be true.
>
> "In [pure] mathematics we never know what we are talking about nor
> whether what we say is true." Mathematics has no direct connection to
> things in the Real World(tm), at best it is a model of RW events but
> since we don't have total information on the RW events it is an
> idealised model. That's not saying that it has no use, even flawed and
> incomplete models can be very useful, but the mathematicial always has
> an 'out', and excuse, that the model is not the Real World(tm) thing
> which it emulates...
Computers are machines that we have built to manipulate numbers. The
more we learn to use them, the closer we are getting to creating a
simulation/representation of a world (similar to) that we live in
(witness the current crop of Online Role Playing games which are
virtual words). We are building a universes from the 'atoms' up, and
we posess the source code.
We were born in a world that was here long ago. We became smarter,
created numbers, and started to notice patterns between physical
actions and interactions, which lead to the many fields of
mathematics. We were never given the source code for the world.
Mathematics, to me, is the reverse engineering of the world and
reality to find the source code. If you've ever looked at the code
base of a large software project, you would know that you really have
to combine both faith and observation to really belive that any system
could really work at all :)
--
burton samograd kruhft .at. gmail
kruhft.blogspot.com www.myspace.com/kruhft metashell.blogspot.com
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