On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 04:19:53PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: > On 5/30/2013 3:43 PM, Russell Standish wrote: > >On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 12:04:13PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: > >>You mean unprovable? I get confused because it seems that you > >>sometimes use Bp to mean "proves p" and sometimes "believes p" > >> > >To a mathematician, belief and proof are the same thing. > > Not really. You only believe the theorem you've proved if you > believed the axioms and rules of inference. What mathematicians > generally believe is that a proof is valid, i.e. that the conclusion > follows from the premise. But they choose different premises, and > even different rules of inference, just to see what comes out.
Fair enough, although if you're a Platonist, I guess you believe in some axioms - the PA ones, for instance. Anyway, this is rapidly departing my area of expertise :). Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
