Mike Russell wrote:
"toby" wrote in message
Since when did "possibly irritating others" influence anyone’s behaviour on Usenet? 🙂
LOL – I thought that might raise a few eyebrows.
I’d like to read the article, if only to find out why anyone calls this a "controversy".
I’ll email you a copy shortly.
If you ask me, it’s merely a user education issue.
It’s a little more than that – it’s a frog and mouse battle, rooted in our psychology. Some people are romantics who, entranced by the light of logic, will follow it anywhere. Others make a virtue of necessity, being shackled to specifics of the dreary world around us.
http://members.fortunecity.com/jonhays/fable.htm .
Since I found the "fable" a little opaque, I’ll insert here Professor Knuth’s characteristically precise gloss on the same events, which I found this evening buried in his 1974 paper, "Structured Programming with go to Statements"
[
http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl04/papers/p261-knuth.pd f]:
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In 1904, Bertrand Russell published his famous paradox about the set of all sets which aren’t members of themselves. This antinomy shook the foundations of classical mathematical reasoning, since it apparently brought very simple and ordinary deductive methods into question. The ensuing crisis led to the rise of "intuitionist logic", a school of thought championed especially by the Dutch mathematician, L. E. J. Brouwer; intuitionism abandoned all deductions that were based on questionable nonconstructive ideas. For a while it appeared that intuitionist logic would cause a revolution in mathematics. But the new approach angered David Hilbert, who was perhaps the leading mathematician of the time; Hilbert said that "Forbidding a mathematician to make use of the principle of the excluded middle is like forbidding an astronomer his telescope or a boxer the use of his fists." He characterized the intuitionist approach as seeking "to save mathematics by throwing overboard all that is troublesome…. They would chop up and mangle the science. If we would follow such a reform as they suggest, we could run the risk of losing a great part of our most valuable treasures"
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Putting all these accounts together, one does gain a picture of the angry gods of mathematics less in the manner of Wind In The Willows than epic Tolkien or thunderous Greek or Hindu mythology.
—
Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com