News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Math Myth by yequalsx on Saturday September 03, 2016 @09:32PM (#12422192)
It depends on where you want to start your axioms. We can go the Whitehead/Russell route or just use this as an axiom.

We convince children that 1+1 =2 without delving into the Peano axioms. It's ok to not delve too deeply into the axiomatic structure of the reals.

Re:The Math Myth by nzp on Sunday September 04, 2016 @11:12AM (#12424719)
You're just proving their point. None of the things you talk about are even remotely obvious or “natural” to people we're talking about. You want them to ”choose axioms”? Axiom-a-whaaa? 1+1=2 does not need Peano axioms because it's cognitively fundamentally different than 0.999...=1.0. It is immediately obvious because dealing with simple arithmetic on natural numbers is in everybody's experience constantly. In other words we do not need to convince them. Clever untrained people would be able to get 0.999... thing quickly if you gave them some explanation and let them think a bit, if they cared, but properties of real numbers are far from obvious or basic.