From: Graham White <graham@dcs.qmul.ac.uk>
To: Categories@mta.ca
Subject: Re: WHY ARE WE CONCERNED? I
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 09:13:52 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <1143706432.8570.16.camel@localhost.localdomain> (raw)
> jim stasheff wrote:
>
> > now for a mathematical subject a math proof is sometimes but not always
> > necessary
>
There's a saying about Lefschetz that he "never wrote a valid
proof, and never made a false conjecture". Now it's not an attitude
that want to encourage, but if you have great mathematicians who
are like that (and Lefschetz was not just a good mathematician, but
a great mathematician, without whom a good deal of modern algebraic
geometry would be unimaginable), then this ought to tell us something.
What it tells us is, of course, not easy to formulate: it's an example
that causes severe problems for almost every philosophy of mathematics
that I know. But it ought to stop us saying things of the form
"if we don't do category theory in such and such a way, then it
won't be mathematics at all".
(Of course we'll all keep saying this, because we all have a secret
fear that, if we aren't really careful about what we do, the grown up
mathematicians will kick sand in our face, but that's a
psychological problem and not a mathematical problem.)
--
Dr. Graham White
Lecturer
Department of Computer Science
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS
http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~graham
(+44)(020)7882 5242
next reply other threads:[~2006-03-30 8:13 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2006-03-30 8:13 Graham White [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2006-03-31 14:30 jim stasheff
2006-03-30 23:44 Colin McLarty
2006-03-30 19:28 Marta Bunge
2006-03-30 17:10 Vaughan Pratt
2006-03-30 14:08 Peter Selinger
2006-03-30 10:33 Nikita Danilov
2006-03-30 9:03 Prof. Peter Johnstone
2006-03-29 15:42 James Stasheff
2006-03-29 13:22 Reinhard Boerger
2006-03-26 21:43 F W Lawvere
2006-03-28 20:51 ` jim stasheff
2006-03-29 20:10 ` Vaughan Pratt
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