[FRIAM] FW: Math emojis

[lrudolph at meganet.net]

Nick:
> Well, Ok.  I can see that it's sort of like Carl Tollander's
>
> "Let there be a spherical cow," which always makes me smile.
>
> Or
>
> Even the micro economists',
>
> "Let there be a fully informed consumer."

I don't claim to be a native speaker of PhysicsEng, much less of EconoEng,
but I've frequently hung out with some of the former, and I've always seen
it stated "Assume a spherical cow".  Further, if either of those
one-liners were to be expanded to a longer
joke-about-jargon-and/or-idealization, my strong intuition suggests that
they would have to be expanded to something along the lines of "Let X be a
spherical cow", "Let C be a fully informed consumer", followed by some
fanciful bloviation (or bovination) about X and C, using fancy jargon (or
pseudojargon; for instance, somewhere around here I have a very old
photocopy of a parody astrophysics article, typeset in the style of--I
believe--the Astrophysical Review, purporting to be "On the
Imperturbability  of Elevator Operators" by Chandrasekharan: the joke in
the title rests on the facts that "operators" and "perturbation" are
standard jargon in mathematical physics, and could quite reasonably appear
near each other in MathPhysEng, but "elevator operators" is just a bit of
slapstick).  Just plain "Let there be", without providing a place-holding
name for the assumed cow or consumer, rings very false.  But (as before)
this is empirical stuff, and if you've really heard them that way (and can
prove it...), then they can occur that way and my skepticism is
unwarranted.  On the other hand, if you're *recreating* the material in
quotation marks *as a representation of what you understood to be the
joke*, then I think you're in the position of the (typically) British man
who, in a meta-joke, tries to re-tell an American joke and gets it
hilariously wrong.

> But how do we tell the jokes from the foundational insights:
>
> Like: "Let there be a number which when multiplied by itself equals -1.
>
> Or that howler of mathematical howlers: "Think of a number greater than
> any
> number you can think of."
>
> Or Knewton's  Knee-slapper: "Calculate the acceleration at an instant."

Well, we do have the proverb "Many a true word is spoken in jest", and
"kidding on the square" is an old and honorable idiom, whereas "kidding on
the square of the hypotenuse" is just a quip, and "kidding on the
hypothesis" might be a translation of "Hypothesis non fingo" but not a
very good one. From your point of view as a pragmatist (Jamesian or
Pierceian, take your pick), what should it *matter* whether we can or
can't "tell the jokes from the foundational insights"?  J: an insight that
sees no inwardness is no insight. P:
If something (a discourse fragment; a stone; a dream--well, not one of
those, in your case) is a "foundational insight", that will (eventually)
be found to be the case *because it became a foundation of something* in
the long run.  If something is a "joke", *that* will (eventually) be found
to be the case because it made you laugh, most often--but not always--in
the short run (and, yes, I have at least several times in my life suddenly
"gotten" a joke decades after hearing or seeing or reading it, as I bet
you have, too; conversely, I've more than several times realized that
something an earlier "I" found to be a real side-splitter wasn't funny at
all).