On Sunday 12 November 2006 11:26, Randall R Schulz wrote:
Don't confuse the loose sense of logic in everyday conversation with the formal mathematical notions of logic. I'm talking only about the latter.
Which perhaps explains why your impassioned arguments are so wide of the mark. By your definition, EVERY department, even biology, and art, should be subordinate to the math department. This is a settled issue. Its already been decided. Virtually every university world wide has yanked computers, programming, and systems analysis out of math departments and created Computer Science departments. By and large they were forced to do this by funding reasons, when business communities started demanding IT workers that were attuned to getting the business done rather than proving some obscure theorem. The pay checks had to be printed on time, and the shipping orders prepared and the instructions to the automated manufacturing machines had to be downloaded. It didn't matter a great deal if it was done in the most efficient way, as long as it was done on time. This argument ran during the 70s, and the math departments of the world lost then and haven't gained any ground since. The world had work to get done, and the only way to do it was to move computer technology out of the math department. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen