I received my first donation on my open-source side project

Re:I received my first donation on my open-source side project by bigiain on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @08:19PM (#25756693)

In my head, there's a difference between "arithmetic" and "mathematics".

People (like economists) who add/subtract/multiply/divide _numbers_ are doing arithmetic.

Mathematics is _rarely_ concerned with "numbers" as such - they deal in "truth" and "systems" and "logic" and "patterns".

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Re:I received my first donation on my open-source side project by susam on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @10:54PM (#25757851)

Indeed! There is a popular saying, "Arithmetic is to mathematics as spelling is to writing." Of course, a mathematician is often good at arithmetic just like a writer is often good at spelling. However, someone merely good at arithmetic is no more a mathematician than someone good at spelling is a writer.

A related story from http://www.ams.org/notices/200410/fea-grothendieck-part2.pdf quoted below:

> There is also a running joke that mathematicians tend to be bad at mental calculations. The story about Grothendieck prime comes to my mind: In a mathematical conversation, someone suggested to Grothendieck that they should consider a particular prime number. "You mean an actual number?" Grothendieck asked. The other person replied, yes, an actual prime number. Grothendieck suggested, "All right, take 57."

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