This is the guy Obama is buddying up to, sending Billions of US Taxpayer Money!

[Plane]

  Math is a special sort of language, I don't think that Spanish is less complex.

    Lets not sell each other short, we have each chosen disaplines that are difficult to learn and practice , that we each went in diffrent directions says nothing about how hard we worked or how well we mastered the difficultys which are all diffrent.

    I am not really happy that our little club has gotten so small, it needs to be bigger and more varied rather than smaller and more homogonous.

     But I do note that all of the members that have elected to stay seem to be quite intelligent, that is self selection and might be very positive.

       What can happen to make our discussions more interesting , and our group more inclusive , and our number increase a bit?

       There are things I like about a small group , but any smaller than we have now , won't produce debate.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Math is much simpler than language, but the human brain is better at language because it has been a survival skill, and math has not. Math is precise. There are no numbers with more than one meaning, as there are words, there is no inflection involved that can change the meaning, and many fewer symbols must be memorized.

The President has to deal with a much greater outflow and a much smaller inflow of money. This is because of the recession, which he did not cause. Most of the people understand this and therefore reelected him rather than voting for tycoon Romney, who would have run up as big a deficit if he followed the vague guidelines he announced.

[Plane]

Language and math have a relationship, and I think it relatable .

There are no numbers with more than one meaning, as there are words, there is no inflection involved that can change the meaning, and many fewer symbols must be memorized....

Hohoho, no! Math does feature things of this sort and more , the number of facts and relationships of numbers and shapes is absolutely infinate.

....but the human brain is better at language because it has been a survival skill...

This is a good point , and it is directly the human language skill that makes human grasp of math possible, things intangible , things irrational, relationships and ratios were discovered in language before there was math as we know it.

To expand this point I would like to say the seaparation of math and language is a hazy border.An artifact of perception that can be disolved.

[Xavier_Onassis]

There is only one meaning for the number 2 in math.

There are at least three distinct meanings for the phoneme in English: to, too, two. To as a preposition has multiple usages.

Mathematics is a type of language, but is a language of a very specialized sort.

It is easy to get a computer to do all sorts of math. It takes much more capacity to get a computer to understand a written language, and more still to understand a spoken language. It takes vastly more than that to design a computer program that can carry on an intelligible conversation on even a simple topic.

[Plane]

You mean that math can have a lot of rigor.

True , and it can have much stubtlety also like the square root of negative two.

When you say the square root of negative two are you useing a language to convey a meaning or math to convey a concept ?

>I would be loth to instruct you on Spanish , your experience in that subject must be an order of magnitude greater than mine.<

Observe the above sentance, if the math were extracted it would loose all meaning, with the language subtracted it would be a blank space.

Observe your previous post , in which you state that language can be translated into boolian logic with some difficulty, that is a translation, even if a difficult one.

[Xavier_Onassis]

The square root of a negative number is what is called an "imaginary number" because it exists on the imagination. There are mathematical concepts that cannot be expressed in words, because language is an artificial construct to describe what is important to a group of people, and there are generally insufficient numbers of people that actually care about obscure mathematical constructs.

There are some mathematical constructs that cannot be put into language. There are an infinity of non mathematical concepts that cannot be expressed in mathematical symbols and numbers.

I don't recall saying anything about Boolean logic at all. I said that language comprehension is quite difficult to program into a computer, and only simple commands can be understood.

[Plane]

Imaginary numbers are quite real, they are handy for describing things that have a phaze relationship.

If you grab a big highly charged capacitor you will get a real burn from imaginary voltage.

Every mathmatical term has a language equivelent, every one of them. In theroy one could make a mathmatical term for every word there is , but this will not happen because it would be a huge and pointless task.

Oh wait a minute , we do want computers that we can talk to, so we need computers that can understand language.

So once we have a really good algorythym for converting the meaning of a word to something that a computer can "get" (Boolian algebra) .

Someday then, everything that can be converted in meaning from human language to machine language will be understood by computers and this will include every single word, phrase , denotation and connotation.

At that point we should elect computers to high office and quit worrying about it.