Re: Re: More /.{I->-1} craziness
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg106800] Re: [mg106713] Re: More /.{I->-1} craziness
- From: DrMajorBob <btreat1 at austin.rr.com>
- Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010 07:37:40 -0500 (EST)
- References: <200912300915.EAA17299@smc.vnet.net> <hhhmn8$o9t$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Reply-to: drmajorbob at yahoo.com
Amen. It's a long way to nirvana, but we'll never get there pretending we're already there. Bobby On Thu, 21 Jan 2010 03:57:09 -0600, AES <siegman at stanford.edu> wrote: > In article <hj40q4$sgk$1 at smc.vnet.net>, > Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote: > >> But can you show they learn more >> calculus if they have Mathematica at hand? > > Speaking only for myself (and noting that my calculus-learning days are > far in the past, and that I'm not at all sure what the operational > meaning of "learn more calculus" might be), I can only say that having > Mathematica at hand whenever I'm doing any kind of "maths" whether > it's learning more about some familiar or new mathematical topic, or > trying to solve some real problem using math certainly enables me to > gain immensely more insight and/or intuition into what the symbols on > the paper mean, or how the mathematically described system of interest > will actually behave. Mathematica can really be "insanely great" at > helping do that, and I'm grateful for it. > > But it's Mathematica that's the "tool" for producing results here, and > the conventional mathematical symbols as conventionally written on paper > and the real physical systems that are the important realities the > things that most of us want to concentrate on not the arcane and > sometimes inconsistent or even bizarre innards of Mathematica. > > Which is why it's so egregious and some of us so unsympathetic when > attempts to apply Mathematica to some conventional mathematical input in > what would seem a sensible and consistent fashion instead trigger some > arcane Mathematica "gotcha"; and Mathematica acolytes then try to > convince us that, hey, that's the way Mathematica works, and we must > therefore accept it as near divinely inspired, and focus unlimited > energies on learning the arcane (and often very ill-documented) details > of what Mathematica does, not the tasks we want to accomplish with it. > > Mathematica is a _commercial tool_, not a divinely endowed > accomplishment of human creativity before which we must all bow down > (and that remains true not withstanding the large amount of great human > creativity that has obviously gone into developing it). > -- DrMajorBob at yahoo.com