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Re: something i found interesting...

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Saturday, September 2, 2000, 3:56
On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Jonathan Chang wrote:

> In a message dated 2000:09:01 4:26:35 PM, Cprincessw@AOL.COM writes: > > As to math being international, in different cultures there are differing > approaches to counting, i.e. base-10 (decimal) , base-2 (binary), etc ad > infinitum...
Definitely agreed. The way everyday people do math is quite different from the way mathematicians at Cornell U. (and probably at other similar institutions) do math. Heck, mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists often use different notation for the same thing, or conceptualize them differently. As a math major I find some common physics notation horribly imprecise, but for the physic majors' needs, math notation is too cumbersome, and so on. The joke I've heard (from a CS professor) is that mathematicians take logarithms in base e, engineers in base 10 <shudder>, and computer scientists in base 2. And that's not even going to the differences between how "ordinary people" (as opposed to crazy people like math majors!) conceptualize things like number and quantity, let alone proof. Some of my friends *cringe* when I describe what little I've heard of the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms....(I hope I spelled that right.) YHL