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Mathematics is hard for mathematicians to understand too

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Re: Mathematics is hard for mathematicians to understand too

#151
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, the argument is even dumber than that. The person who writes a poem hasn't created any literature. Sure they have, by virtue of writing it down. It becomes literature when it hits the paper (or computer screen, as it were). (Unless you mean to imply that formulating an original poem in your mind counts as "writing", in which case I guess we illustrate the overarching point of value in shared symbols and languag…

> Unless you mean to imply that formulating an original poem in your mind counts as "writing" You're close. I'm making the point that, in modern English, no other verb is available for the act of creating a poem. Here's a quote from the fantasy novel The Way of Kings that always appealed to me: >> "Many of our nuatoma -- this thing, it is the same as your lighteyes, only their eyes are not light--" >> "How can you be…

> I'm making the point that, in modern English, no other verb is available for the act of creating a poem.

You literally used another perfectly acceptable verb in modern English besides “writing” for the act of creating a poem in the very sentence making this claim, which somewhat undermines the claim.

Re: Mathematics is hard for mathematicians to understand too

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mathematics is such an old field, older than anything except arguably philosophy If we are already venturing outside of scientific realm with philosophy, I'm sure fields of literature or politics are older. Especially since philosophy is just a subset of literature.

> I'm sure fields of literature or politics are older. As far as anybody can tell, mathematics is way older than literature. The oldest known proper accounting tokens are from 7000ish BCE, and show proper understanding of addition and multiplication. The people who made the Ishango bone 25k years ago were probably aware of at least rudimentary addition. The earliest writings are from the 3000s BCE, and are purely adm…

> Literature, by definition, appeared later than writing.

Literature, by strict defintion, appeared no earlier than writing, but it is only a tentative conclusion from which surviving writing has been found and understood that it appeared later than writing.

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