• Gladaed@feddit.org
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      1 day ago

      Wrong. Good look fooling around without algebra for years. New methods make old maths easy.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 day ago

        …and even newer methods make old math insanely complicated, but much more generalized. Like building definitions for things like numbers and basic arithmetic using set theory.

        • Gladaed@feddit.org
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          1 day ago

          No sarcasm. Being able to use numbers, integrals and derivatives makes a huge amount of maths easy. Exponential function and it’s relatives are so handy. (Sin, Cos, Tan, Cot, log).

          The Greeks didn’t have any of that to do their math.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 day ago

        To be fair, the first 100 pages of that was justifying the set theory definition for what numbers are. The following two hundred papers are proving that a process of iterative counting we call addition functions in a consistent and useful way, given the set theory way of defining numbers. Once we get to that point, 1+1 is easy. Then we get to start talking more deeply about iteration as a process, leading to considering iterating addition (aka multiplication), iterating multiplication (aka exponents), etc. But that stuff is for the next thousand pages.

        Remember, 0 is defined as the amount of things in the empty set {}. 1 is defined as the amount of things in a set containing the empty set {{}}. Each following natural number is defined as the amount of things in a set containing each of the previous nonnegative integers. So for example 2 is the amount of things in a set containing the empty set and a set containing the empty set {{}, {{}}}, 3 is the amount of things in a set containing the empty set, a set containing the empty set, and a set containing the empty set and a set containing the empty set {{}, {{}}, {{}, {{}}}}, etc. All natural numbers are just counting increasingly recursively labeled nothing. Welcome to math.