Generalized logic
Today was the perfect sort of day for staying inside and reading a book, in that the outside temperature was so cold as to kill you instantly. (Well, kill me anyway. I’m a total wuss.) I’ve borrowed a copy of A random walk in science from my colleague Don, a rather well-known collection of humorous anecdotes and satirical papers aimed at the amusement of math-and-science types. (The book, not Don.*)
* Although Don himself contains quite a collection of humorous anecdotes aimed at math-and-sciences types, too.
Not only does the book contain a more complete version of Joel Cohen’s Perjorative calculus, one of my favorite pieces of (il)logical wordplay, but today I found a clever article by Paul Dunmore called On the uses of fallacy, which begins thus:
In the last hundred years or so, mathematics has undergone a tremendous growth in size and complexity and subtlety. This growth has given rise to a demand for more flexible methods of proving theorems than the laborious, difficult, pedantic, “rigorous” methods previously in favor. This demand has been met by what is now a well-developed branch of mathematics known as Generalized Logic. I won’t develop the theory of Generalized Logic in detail, but I must introduce some necessary terms. In Classical Logic, a Theorem consists of a True Statement for which there exists a Classical Proof. In Generalized Logic, we relax both of these restrictions…
Damn, that’s funny.
You can read the rest here, if you’d like.
