Quote:
Originally Posted by tdvance
Mathematics is amazing in that you can take some axioms that appear to hold in practice, do a lot of stuff on paper involving manipulating symbols without actually touching what you are modelling, derive some theorems, go out and measure things, and find out they agree with the theorem to many decimal places. Some author called it "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics". An example, take a rectangular patio. measure the two sides, square the lengths and sum them, then take the square root. A mathematical theorem says that this will be the diagonal length. Measure it, and find that it is right. In fact, if it doesn't come out right, it means you screwed up measuring!!!
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... or the patio is not quite rectangular (corners aren't right angles);
... or the space on which you measured it isn't Euclidean, say your (humongous) patio covers a substantial part of the earth's surface, or is on asteroid Philplait!
