Re: OT: Helen Keller & Whorf-Sapir

I personally find a great deal in common between maths and language. Its
all the same... manipulating symbols (words, morphemes) according to
certain rules... and I wouldn't be surprised if the language centers of
the brain are active when someone is manipulating formulae etc. For most
maths problems I think visualization isn't actually that useful.... you
tell me what you visualize when solving problems in number theory, group
theory, or most of pure maths or statistics. The only part of
mathematics where visualization is sometimes helpful is applied maths,
and even then not always. If you're working in a 4-dimensional space how
exactly do you visualize what's going on? I don't know about you but my
brain doesn't do pictures with more than 3 dimensions in them, so if you
ever want to do relativity you'll need to wean yourself off those images
in your brain a little. Pictures don't constitute proof and often can be
misleading.

>Samuel Rivier scripsit:
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>>I'm a physics and math and linguistics major, and I
>>will testify that every engineer thinks First with his
>>senses (images), Second with numbers and logic, and
>>Finally with what little logic we can convey
>>linguistically.
>>
>>
>
>I'm an engineer too, and I don't have an image anywhere in my head.
>For me, computer programming is a verbal discipline, not mathematical.
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>>Thought is first and foremost empirical - we imagine
>>the abstract--what was and what might be--through our
>>senses first. The language part comes along to
>>organize it later.
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>>
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>Well, some people do, absolutely.  There's no reason to think
>we're all wired up the same way, and some reason to think otherwise.
>
>--
>Values of beeta will give rise to dom!          John Cowan
>(5th/6th edition 'mv' said this if you tried    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
>to rename '.' or '..' entries; see              cowan@ccil.org
>http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/odd.html)
>
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>

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