Archive for the ‘CoPs in Math’ Category

Message from Calculemus

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

James Davenport’s plea for providing more insights on the proof and how one got it done and … if a computer can’t solve it, is it really not provable. Shouldn’t it rather return “I can’t solve it”?

An interesting comment wrt. to the fact that William Farmer and Alan Bundy pointed me to, that is that the way mathematicians present and illustrate a proof (in publications, books, and even lectures) is not the way we actually retrieved the proof.

And it contributes to another interesting discussion, that is whether or not trusting and accepting automatically computed proofs (see the Flyspeck project).

Message from MKM: Mathematical Exercises

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

There are multiple solution to a mathematical exercise:

Message from MKM: Mathematical Units

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

James Davenport gave a talk on mathematical units in OpenMath.

New to me was the discussion on whether and when CDs/ units/ notations are obsolete (e.g. out-of-date)

  • OpenMath CD is obsolete if the definition in it are for archival purposes only.
  • A unit is obsolete by formal change (e.g. liter_pre1964) and by usage.

Or to distinguish relative and absolute temperatures … for addition “abs”+”rel”=”abs” (not arith1-plus?) …

Units are also very interesting in making mathematical expressions more intuitive and context-dependent. Maybe: A renderer converting from 1.2 miles (English) to (ca.) 1,92 km (German) should also convert the units and thus needs to provide basic computations (e.g. from miles to km)?