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Thread ID: 29820	2003-02-04 01:16:00	OT: A question for skilled mathematicians, or am I just thick?	Billy T (70)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
118081	2003-02-04 08:53:00	Heather P. How can you beat your daughter at scrabble if you use words like formulaes?	rugila (214)
118082	2003-02-04 08:55:00	I cheat!	Heather P (163)
118083	2003-02-04 08:57:00	And as for matrices, these have (among other things) very useful application in the design of electric circuits, which were what I think motivated this thread in the first place.	rugila (214)
118084	2003-02-04 09:01:00	OK, just checked the dictionary. formula (pl. -ae, -as) So does this mean I was right twice or wrong once or wrong twice? (Seeing as how this is a maths question) ?:|	Heather P (163)
118085	2003-02-04 09:12:00	Heather: You're baiting me. Formula is an old word from Latin (which has been a dead language for centuries. Plural of Latin words ending in -a was -ae, like mensa (=table) mensae (=tables), these was no -s plural in Latin. English speakers generally like their plurals with -s, so they tend to like formulas, whereas some of the stickers to tradition prefer formulae. Either is acceptable in modern English as your dictionary indicates. Formulaes is one word=one error = not in any dictionary of which I am aware. PS I never was a schoolteacher - they didn't like my ideas and wouldn't have me.	rugila (214)
118086	2003-02-04 09:23:00	Me? Bait people? Surely not! ;) The problem with a wide and varied vocabulary. Sometimes I fool even myself.	Heather P (163)
118087	2003-02-04 09:25:00	OK, just checked the dictionary. formula (pl. -ae, -as) So does this mean I was right twice or wrong once or wrong twice? (Seeing as how this is a maths question) Fomula is ONE of them. Formulae and / or Formulas or More that one. Formulaes does NOT compute. :-) Means you were just wrong ONCE!!!!	Elephant (599)
118088	2003-02-04 09:29:00	Ah Elephant, Sometimes it is far more fun to be spectacularly wrong by being wrong twice rather than just a mere once. Being wrong just once is really quite tame. Are you sure?	Heather P (163)
118089	2003-02-04 09:41:00	An interesting thought Heather?:| To my mathematically challenged mind, maths and logic go hand in hand, yet although I cannot fathom maths, I earn my living as a diagnostician, which requires a very logical mind with just the occasional flight of fancy for a left field solution. Maybe I just should have stayed awake in class a bit more :8} Cheers Billy 8-{) :|	Billy T (70)
118090	2003-02-04 10:17:00	What does a diagnostician do? Is that medical diagnostics? Or some other type? The extent to which mathematics is logical and/or vice versa has been the subject of some dispute. Basically they just both do their own thing and don’t entirely coincide. Around 1890 the German logician Gottlob Frege published (after many years work) his attempt to put all arithmetic (which is the totality of what computers do apart from making noises, having bugs, taking up space and using power) on a consistent logical basis. Not many years later Bertrand Russell totally demolished Frege’s thesis with a two-line paradox. Some years later (1930’s) the Austrian logician Kurt Godel proved that some pseudo-logical systems (including elementary arithmetic and thus including computer arithmetic) contained valid propositions that could not be proved valid or invalid within the system itself, and were thus not logical in this sense at least. Most of our modern logic comes from the Greek Aristotle, after whom we tend to automatically accept obvious but not necessarily valid fundamental premises such as “what is true cannot be false” and similar. This sort of stuff has been challenged by a variety of thinkers such as the American CS Pierce (he pronounced his name as “purse”, does Google tell you this?) who developed a “three valued” logic as an antidote to Aristotle’s two valued version. Why am I writing this stuff anyway? What did you say diagnosticians do, and why do they need to be logical?	rugila (214)
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