3 ms·
Marcus du Sautoy has a different approach on the issue, which goes along the lines: Conjecture: some evidence there Hypothesis: strong evidence or very strong
by atmosx 13y ago
Marcus du Sautoy has a different approach on the issue, which goes along the lines:
Conjecture: some evidence there
Hypothesis: strong evidence or very strong evidence, such that sciences would have accepted the hypothesis as a theorem. The Riemann Hypothesis mentioned, is the prominent example: Everyone beliefs it's true for more than 100 years, none has provided a full-featured proof BUT even huge clusters failed to find a stretch of evidence that might NOT be correct.
- pash 13y agoI agree with that distinction. Another notable class of mathematical "hypotheses" are those, like the continuum hypothesis [0], whose truth is formally undecideable but that many mathematicians nevertheless believe to be true in some sense. If this class of statements has any analogue in the empirical sciences, I guess it must be "unscientific" (untestable) hypotheses, about which philosophers (or theoretical physicists) might still find interesting things to say. Mathematicians also use the word "hypothesis" to refer to a whole implication in the phrase "inductive hypothesis". But it most often simply means the left side of an implication: the phrase "A is true by hypothesis" means that A was assumed to be true—that is, it was the starting point of a proof. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis