SGU COMMUNITY Livestream // Friday March 26th 2021
Added 2021-03-26 23:48:24 +0000 UTChttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8eV_hNNHZw
Comments
There was an offhand comment within the mathematics discussion about the nature of words, as a contrast to the nature of imaginary numbers. I thought you might be interested in knowing that there is no consensus among linguists about what, exactly, a word is. And that actually makes sense when you look at the way different languages approach the concept. Irrespective of whether we want to go with a syntactic usage (German, with its tendency to stack words on other words makes that a fool's errand), phonemic (pick the nature of your phonemes and you can find a language that has words that don’t use the phonemes described), or orthographic (any symbolic language will undo you here), there are exceptions to however you might choose to define it. Given the sheer number of languages, both extant and extinct, I'm not convinced that we’ll ever get a definition of "word" that will be both linguistically satisfying and practical in its application for other uses.
Jim Phynn
2021-03-28 13:23:36 +0000 UTCOh, 1 more thing. The beauty of mathematics is that the study of it is often way ahead of it's application. My favorite example is Gray code. First discovered (if that's the word) by some monk centuries ago. Super useful in aviation engineering as it turns out..
Jess Donovan
2021-03-27 09:39:51 +0000 UTCYou guys are missing the point by quite a ways, I think, with irrational numbers etc. Mathematics itself is an abstraction. A series of scratches in the dirt is not the sheep I have. But it describes it pretty well. Roman numerals do it better, Arabic numbers better again.. Also you don't have to go to quantum physics for Imaginary and complex numbers being useful for description. Anything with oscillation like springs or electrical stuff just for instance. When you say 'Pi exists in the real world' so do imaginary numbers in EXACTLY the same way. Mathematics is only useful as a tool of description. It is never the real thing. Don't get hung up on terminology like 'imaginary' or 'irrational' as though they mean the same thing mathematically as they do in common usage.
Jess Donovan
2021-03-27 09:34:31 +0000 UTC
