Replying to LO28458 --
Dear Organlearners,
Judy Tal <judyt@netvision.net.il> writes:
>Descart, who's considered to be one of the (if not The)
>fathers of all western scientific disciplines of study, is
>also responsible for out tendency to embed comlex
>numbers into Cartesian maps: coordinates, 2x2 matrixes,
>Euclides geometry (the way we see it ...) etc, etc,
Greetings dear Judy,
I think of Rene Descarte as the person who articulated first something
which had been going on already centuries before him, but on a tacit level
of knowing. What he did, was to subject philosophy to reason. Therefor he
can be considered as the father of the Age of Reason.
There is a lesson which we can learn from Geology and Biology which have
retained some of the "descriptive dimension" in them. It is possible to
describe many things which cannot be prescribed by reason. I think it is
this "descriptive dimension" that we need so much in learning. There is
too much of the "prescriptive dimension" in learning for me.
>Andrew, I'm sure you'll support me here ... even
>though you live under the (false) impression that
>you do not understand mathematics :-)))
Anyone who can create with reason form out of content and then out of that
form, taken as content, even deeper form, is a "tacit" mathematician. What
makes that person a "formal" mathematician, is when that person
* articulates the form with abstract symbols
* uses reason which invokes LEM (Law of Excluded Middle)
Andrew creates paintings, using brush strokes with different colours as
the abstract symbols. He can also give reasons why he made each stroke.
But i think too many painful cuts have been inflicted upon him in his
youth by math teachers using LEM in matters where LEM does not apply. Yet
it is for him to say.
By the way, the Afrikaans and Dutch word for the cutting part of a knive
is "lem".
With care and best wishes,
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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