3 ms·

It's extremely obvious that the author is a computer scientist

• fredliu 8y ago
  Exactly! I didn't know the author, but couldn't help but check on his background after reading the blogpost. It's almost a dead giveaway for excerpts like 'The notion of a counter is not that of a single concrete class of object, it is an abstract description of the behaviour of a system providing certain operations satisfying certain rules.' , and 'A number is not any one thing, it is any one of any number of things that implement some operations (and there are different types of number depending on what operations you want to implement).'
  • _bxg1 8y ago
    And the very first thing he did was define natural numbers as a grammar of operations with rules for interpretation
• DRMacIver 8y ago
  I mean, I guess I am? I'm technically doing a PhD in it at the moment, but my opinions on philosophy of mathematics don't have much to do with the finer details of test-case reduction. My actual degree, which is where most of my philosophy of mathematics opinions were developed, is in very pure mathematics. I've done quite a lot of software development since and that's definitely shaped the framing, but the core philosophy is one that I've had since long before I knew much about computer science at all.