Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] In Math, Computers Don't Lie. Or Do They?

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:

> This quotation accurately expresses my viewpoint on the subject:
>
> The author, however, takes any hint that Einstein did not work in an
> intellectual vacuum as proof positive that he was a plagiarist - as if
> any scientific creation is a purely individual activity. Einstein
> himself acknowledged that the special theory of relativity would soon
> have been formulated without him, while claiming (correctly I believe)
> that, in his absence, the general theory would not have been so easy to
> arrive at. Indeed, Bjerknes has a much harder time producing evidence of
> Einstein's "plagiarism" of the general theory, a topic I shall not
> discuss.


I was talking to a math prof at dinner last night.  He said that the
internet is teeming with cranks who attack Einstein and Cantor.  We
guessed that they attack Einstein because by defeating Einstein (in their
own minds) they prove their own genius.  We can't understand why they
attack Cantor!  Apparently they don't like his "diagonal method" for
showing that integers and real numbers cannot be put in one-to-one
correspondence.

Now I think all the angry criticism might be motivated by anti-semitism.
I assume Cantor was Jewish.  Some paranoid psychotic people become
extremely racist and/or anti-semitic.

Mike
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