Logic Matters 2008-05-07

Folklore

I was sitting at tea at CMS yesterday listening to Martin Hyland and Thomas Forster talking about set theories, and it struck me -- not for the first time -- how important a certain kind of informal discussion is to the mathematical enterprise.You'd miss some fun ("fun" in a rather stretched sense, but you know what I mean) if you didn't ever have face-to-face philosophical discussions. But you wouldn't necessarily miss out on a lot of philosophy. Because in written philosophy, you do still get the to and fro of ideas, the false starts, the dead ends, the conjectures, the refutations -- often in the writing of a single author as she wrestles with objections and counter-objections. The dynamic is there on the pages (not in its untidiest and rawest form, to be sure, but still very evident). With mathematics ...

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