A Math Rant
This math rant comes originally from Petr Beckmann in the preface to
his
book A History of Pi, (ISBN 0-911762-18-3): "There are
[paraphrasing]
two true and all too tried ways of making mathematics repugnant to
people:
one way is to brutalize the reader by assertions without proof, and the
other
way is to beat him over the head with epsilonics and proofs of
existence
and unicity." There are an awful lot of proofs of existence and unicity
out
there, and an awful lot of very bad proofs that skip the key steps, and
too
few explanations of why math works.
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Last updated May 23, 2005