Friday 9 March 2007

The bane of my existence (well, one of them)

I had a heavy statistics class today, for a biology module i'm studying. I understand the basic concept under examination, but not how the formulae relate to it. One interesting thought did occur to me though:

Mathematicians must get confused, looking at properly-constructed sentences; in this case, they might attempt to subtract the latter half of this sentence from the former, due to the presence of a hyphen (brackets would likely confuse them too, if there was no evident transformation of their contents).

Semi-colons would probably be taken as a combination of sub-and super-script, denoting that 'prime' label, and suchlike.

To my mind, mathematics should be entirely relegated, to be solely the preserve of computers; allowing us to get on with our lives in peace, free from numerical tyranny. All algebraic substitutions of letters for numbers could then be safely outlawed, so as to prevent the illusory and disappointing similitude between ugly mathmatical statements and beauteous lexemes, which i love so very much.

4 comments:

nicolette said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Equivocationalist said...

Indeed; i aim to please. I mean, i'm pleased to aim.
*takes aim at Nicole*

nicolette said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Equivocationalist said...

quite.