Death by Peano

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I had a strange dream last night, the latest in a series of crazy subconcious goings-on:

I was sitting in the back row of a law lecture. And the professor was babbling on about... something. When she arrived at some natural pausing point, she noted that eeeeeverybody knows that the set of natural numbers includes the negative integers--

--It's a dream. Quiet now.

She called on me. And I said that she wasn't quite correct. I tried explaining this, with no success at convincing her or the rest of the class. (Though a high school friend, who will remain unnamed, was sitting next to me... he bought it.)

Professor and I went back and forth until I had to explain some history on the Peano axioms and successor operations. And you just can't get to the negative integers that way. But why argue--it's an issue of a vocabulary word. This still didn't work. And I ended up yelling the old quote by Kronecker:

"Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk!"

--except, now looking at it, I'm sure I didn't get the quote quite right. Regardless, German things sound angrier, ja?

...

O', sleep deprivation and math. Quite a kick.

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This page contains a single entry by Brandon published on March 15, 2008 11:40 AM.

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