LL-L "History" 2009.01.04 (05) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 04 January 2009 - Volume 05
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Idiomatica" 2009.01.04 (02) [D/E]

> From: M.-L. Lessing <marless at gmx.de>
> Subject: LL-L "Idiomatica" 2009.01.03 (02) [E]
>

> with character. How we express things must influence what we think of
> them. -- Another such (private) suspicion of mine is that France has
> produced so many glorious mathematicians because of their odd way of
> counting. Counting in French is, you know, half calculating already,
> much more so than in other languages. A french child that can count to
> 100 can do multiplications and sums and all that automatically and
> immediately can start into Legendre-polynomes, Lagrange-functions,
> Fourier-transformations, Cauchy-criteria etc. :-) No wonder every
> second name in the history of maths is french. Complication can be
> useful in posing challenges and training to human mind! At least I
> suspect it is so; it would be much trouble to prove scientifically the
> influence of french counting on the production rate of maths geniuses
> over, say, 5 generations. -- Well, germans have produced Gauß and
> Euler, that must do for us. Gauß surely does, good old Gauß! :-)

Euler was Swiss, and worked mainly in Russia, though I take it that you
mean French-speaking.

I'm amazed you think that Germany is lacking in prominent
mathematicians. Cantor and so on? And of course Austrian mathematicians
are German-speaking: Gödel, for instance.

Nor does proficiency at arithmetic mean anything in terms of
mathematical competence. Although Euler was an amazing infra-skull
calculator, many important algebraists have been poor at arithmetic.

In fact Cantor was really the supreme counter of his time: he was the
first to count to infinity and beyond.

Hoping memory has served and I've got all my nationals in the right
place...!

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/
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