User:Boris Tsirelson/Sandbox1: Difference between revisions

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===From technical to human: definitions===
Similarly to a living thing, mathematics is a unity within an environment, yet apart from it — a compartment of a larger whole, structurally distinguishable though not functionally completely isolated from or closed to its surroundings.<ref>This phrase is borrowed from [[Life#&nbsp;&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;&nbsp;Cells]].</ref>
 
The gap between a bare hardware and a nice application is too wide for a single jump, or even a triple jump (hardware – operating system – programming language – application). Bridging the gap is a laborious task for many programmers. They compose programs of modules, and modules from subroutines. Each subroutine reduces a bit more useful task to a bit simpler tasks. Ultimately, a useful (or even fascinating) task is reduced to the technical instructions of the bare hardware.
 
Likewise, mathematicians bridge the wide gap between useful notions (say, "ellipse" or "normal distribution") and the primitive notions by a large and complicated system of definitions. Each definition reduces a bit more useful notion to a bit simpler notions.

Revision as of 12:25, 19 June 2010

Similarly to a living thing, mathematics is a unity within an environment, yet apart from it — a compartment of a larger whole, structurally distinguishable though not functionally completely isolated from or closed to its surroundings.[1]

  1. ↑ This phrase is borrowed from Life#  —  Cells.
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