Professor Wesley Calvert spoke on the topic 'How is a Proof Like a Function' at the Department Colloquium on April 1. No really he did! The abstract follows:
Mathematics seems to have quite a lot to do with functions; see how many mathematics courses are, implicitly, or explicitly, about functions. We mathematicians are also rather fond of proofs.
Proofs are the gold standard of what it means to have conclusively solved a mathematical problem. More recently, mathematicians have also been very interested in computers.
These three things (just a few of our favorite things) — functions, proofs, and computer programs — are related in very deep ways. In a sense, we can think of them as different forms of the same objects. I’ll tell you how this is so.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment