53
edits
Changes
→"Nearly every great mathematician"
::::: PeterS, your comments are becoming increasingly long-winded, incoherent and insulting. Get to the point succinctly and politely, and I'll respond to you. Otherwise, I'm not going to waste my time. By the way, I don't have a definition for "great mathematician," nor is one necessary for such a term.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 10:24, 21 March 2008 (EDT)
::::: PeterS, your comments are becoming increasingly long-winded, incoherent and insulting. Get to the point succinctly and politely, and I'll respond to you. Otherwise, I'm not going to waste my time. By the way, I don't have a definition for "great mathematician," nor is one necessary for such a term.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 10:24, 21 March 2008 (EDT)
Then you've just conceded his point. If you don't define what constitutes a "great mathematician" then you can not define the set of "great mathematicians" therefore you can not legitimately claim that "nearly every great mathematician was homeschooled" be cause it is completely unquantifiable. Like-wise, you refuse to define what constitutes "homeschooled". For you, it appears to mean anyone who ever learned anything outside of a traditional public school system education from K-12 and college... but this ignores the fact that such traditional structure has not been commonplace since the dawn of history. Many of the examples you give are from several hundred years ago when this structure was not in plaace in the manner it is to day, yet you conflate any kind of home learning in that time period with homescholling as it is today... the two are not necessarily equivalent. You want them to be, in order to push your ideology. Also, discounting any example given as either "not a great mathematician" or labelling them "homeschooled" because they have some minor period of time that they were not traditionally schooled seems a prime example of either conservative deceit or deliberate ignorance. And, in case you are actually interested in true facts, and a quantifiable definition of great mathematicians... here's at least one list of the 100 greatest per Mathematics Teacher magazine from 1962: afrodita.rcub.bg.ac.yu/~flora/100.html You might note that Kepler is among the names listed. [[User:QNA|QNA]] 11:22, 21 March 2008 (EDT)