On Feb 28, 2008, at 9:00 AM, John F. Sowa wrote:
> ...
> Practicing mathematicians -- people who actually solve problems
> that other people pay somebody to solve -- dismiss the study
> of foundations as *irrelevant*. (01)
I don't think they dismiss it so much as ignore it. As a
mathematician friend of mine put it to me recently when I sent him the
link to an article on the 100th anniversary of Zermelo's
axiomatization of set theory (mentioned in this forum in a reply to
Avril Styrmann (http://tinyurl.com/35zsls)): (02)
"Most working mathematicians would rather not think about foundational
issues, just as most meat-eaters would rather not think about how the
animals are slaughtered." (03)
:-) He then noted: (04)
"But logic has a way of breaching the barricades. In my own field, for
instance, it is known that the existence of a complete set of
biholomorphic invariants for domains in multi-dimensional complex
space is independent of ZFC (either with or without the continuum
hypothesis). I don't lose sleep over it." (05)
-chris (06)
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