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Math is a subset of language, surely.
by swayvil 1y ago
Math is a subset of language, surely.
- kanbankaren 1y agoProbably true. Math used to be written in prose style before we invented symbols to compress the prose. Most of the symbols are very recent just in the last 200 years or so.
- klipt 1y agoSome types of math benefit a lot from visual reasoning. Like geometry.
- ducttapecrown 1y agoGeometry only benefits from visual reasoning in 3d and lower, and there are a lot of dimensions above that! You can see visual reasoning as a little cheat computation, you can run math problems through your sense-determining brain, which is what brains are really good at (robots struggle with our levels of dexterity). But the fact remains that you can only visualize in low dimensions, and there are infinitely many dimensions. Note: You can reduce many problems to 3d, but also many problems in 3d have configuration spaces with much higher dimension, so there's some nuance.
- bell-cot 1y agoIt's easily argued that languages are subsets of math.
- del_operator 1y agoLeft as an exercise for the reader.
- ulbu 1y agoand both are instances / processes of symbolic composition.
- DiscourseFan 1y agoBefore Godel, yeah. Many in math departments would like to believe that claim but would not accept it when pressed.
- js8 1y agoEasily? Not sure. But perhaps it's a linguistic version of the Skolem paradox. Looks like Hilary Putnam had some things to say on that..