----- Original Message ----- From: Bob Blakely Subject: Re: Numbers and the Golden Section
> All mathematics is counting - things exist or they do not. Mathematics has > therefore always existed. Because you may have no language to describe > something does not mean it doesn't exist. The symbology of mathematics is > the tool, not mathematics itself. I dunno Bob. Can you separate the language (symbology) from the concept and still have the concept survive? We conceptualize by translating into a language we can understand. I don't think we use language to form concepts, rather we use language to describe them. I have a friend who's ancestry is Ojibway. He is a computer technician, amoung other things. In his native language, the closest he can come to saying "computer" is something roughly "the head that has no body". It's because the Ojibway had no concept for "computer", and the few people who still speak that language work in (primarily) English when working with computers, so the language never adopted a term to describe the concept of a computer. Now I am not saying that there are no computers, merely that someone who spoke only Ojibway could not have invented them. If the opposite were true, they would have a word for it. William Robb
