Re: OT Re: DISAGREEMENTS and THIS LIST was goo now Sercret Chord

["Krispen Hartung" <info@krispenhartung.com>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "andy butler"
> In UK while I was a pre-teen schoolkid for some reason the powers that
> be decided that symbolic logic (in it's guise as Set Theory) needed to 
>be 
> taught
> as a pre-cursor to maths.
> I don't know what the other kids made of this (or indeed the teachers) 
>but 
> I found it incredibly easy to draw the diagrams and get the answers, 
>...it 
> felt like cheating.

Leave it to the Brits to think of something as brilliant as that.  Logic, 
especially set theory should by all means precede mathematics. Maybe you 
can 
thank your famous Bertrand Russell for that (one of my favorite 
philosophers, btw, though I never had the patience to read the the three 
volume mammoth work Principia Mathematica, which he wrote with Whitehead).

You have to love Russell's set theory paradox though:
"It might be assumed that, for any formal criterion, a set exists whose 
members are those objects (and only those objects) that satisfy the 
criterion; but this assumption is disproved by a set containing exactly 
the 
sets that are not members of themselves. If such a set qualifies as a 
member 
of itself, it would contradict its own definition as a set containing sets 
that are not members of themselves. On the other hand, if such a set is 
not 
a member of itself, it would qualify as a member of itself by the same 
definition. This contradiction is Russell's paradox"


Kris