Pythagoras’ famous theory - which has long been proven and should be made into mathematical law - will never be, because the therm ‘Pythagorean Theorem’ sounds so pleasing.

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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    2 months ago

    A mathematical law is very different from a theorem. A law is something that is fundamentally accepted to be true but it cannot be proven. A theorem can be proven to be true (or false) using the laws of mathematics.

      • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        English was not engineered from the ground up to be sensible and consistent. Instead it evolved slowly over time, as new things got tacked on year after year, and other things died out or drifted in pronunciation.

        Here’s what Middle English sounded like:

        “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour.”

        -Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

        • jet@hackertalks.com
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          2 months ago

          I wonder how that is pronounced vs today. I imagine the spoken version drifts, but the sounds are more similar than the writing.

          • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            We can’t know for certain, since no audio recordings exist for obvious reasons, and we’d need a time machine to find a fluent, native speaker we can be confident is using period-correct pronunciations.

            We can make educated guesses though, by deconstructing existing descendent languages and tracing back commonalities.

            Here’s what we’ve got so far:

            https://youtu.be/5NB2Z6pZBNA

            Also worthy of note that this sort of writing would’ve been distinct from daily commoner chit-chat, which would probably be more recognizable to us. Not sure how much of that got recorded and survived through the years though.

      • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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        2 months ago

        I think this is straight forward. In our everyday life laws aren’t derived from something else either. They just are. And OP seemed to have a hierarchical view of them as well. They were just under the assumption that a theorem could be “promoted”.

        I guess a real-life analogy would be a judge making a ruling under some laws. That would make a precedent in many countries but not a law. If then a new law were passed it could invalidate that precedent similar to someone disproving a theorem.

    • fubo@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      A law is something that is fundamentally accepted to be true but it cannot be proven.

      Counterexamples: The law of sines and law of cosines in trigonometry.

  • jet@hackertalks.com
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    2 months ago

    Math laws are basically axioms, which means Assumptions we hold to be true… meaning they are unprovable, if you could prove them from other axioms, then they would be theories and you wouldn’t have to make a new assumption.

    Everything else is built up on the assumptions and are called theories, assuming the axioms are correct.