hogwash; spacetime is just a phase-space, three orthogonal (and imaginary) coordinates in space, one (real) scalar time; til Gibbs dysassembled Hamilton's "inner and outer products" into his version of Hamilton's "vectors & scalars."
> (And that is the reason we need complex fourvectors, because > these are fully-symmetric upon the change of the timeline.)
thusNso: you don't read Shakespeare til the eleventh grading, or it could seriously mess you "up." til then, one can readily study *mathematica*, which is four subjects, in a "hands-on" manner that does not really require the full-throated use of language -- that one is learning, by doing stuff.
I like UD's _Math.Cranks_, because, in his chapter on fermatistes, he only made one mistake, that I can find, now, and he had acknowledged it, when I told him.
also, he seems to have left numbertheory, out, and that's one of the four, the true meaning of "higher arithmetic."
> http://www.ams.org/notices/201005/rtx100500608p.pdf > author would be in not including Geometry explicitly as part of > mathematics: "So that there is no confusion, let me say that by > 'mathematics' I mean algebra, trigonometry, calculus, linear algebra, > and so on: all those subjects beyond arithmetic."
thusNso: textbooks are often *generically* bad glosses on the discoveries in the original monographs, or simply pedantic workbooks.
the real empty set, to me, is those who attempt proofs, without any grounding in elementary geometrical & numbertheory proofs -- see wlym.com. and, recall, it was Liebniz who gave the generic format of "iff," which is necessity & sufficiency, used meaningfully in various ways in natural language.
the New Math following upon General Bourbaki was a silly thing, since you *need* natural language (and diagrams etc.) to make ready analogies & metaphors for your work. such that, the glaring example of Bourbakism was perhaps Russell's illinguistic "paradoxes" -- whence "silly" deploys from over-reliance on Aristotle's syllogisms!
--Stop BP's capNtrade rip-off; call Waxman & tell him, we need a small *tax* on carbon emmissions, instead of "let the arbitrageurs raise the price of CO2 as much as they can -- free trade, free beer, free dumb!" http://wlym.com
