[FOM] 827: Tangible Incompleteness Restarted/1

[Joe Shipman]

By their proofs shall ye know them.

Seriously, one only has to look at a handful of research papers in graph theory or computation theory to recognize that they are proving theorems of mathematics, in a way in which papers labeled “chemistry” are not.

For a mathematician to think graph theory is “not math” is an abysmal failure of education and communication.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Sep 25, 2019, at 6:12 PM, Timothy Y. Chow <tchow at math.princeton.edu> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, 25 Sep 2019, Joe Shipman wrote:
>> No, I meant specifically "computation theory" as practiced by computer scientists in computer science departments, which involves both much mathematics of graph-theoretic and combinatorial types, and much attention to concrete measures like running time, memory space, communication bandwidth, and program size.
> 
> Thanks for the clarification.
> 
> But I think that the thought process is something like this: They regard "computation theory" as "not math."  They might say, chemistry is a fine and respectable subject, and if quantum chemists find spectral graph theory useful, then more power to them; but that doesn't mean that spectral graph theory is math.
> 
> Tim
> _______________________________________________
> FOM mailing list
> FOM at cs.nyu.edu
> https://cs.nyu.edu/mailman/listinfo/fom