Margus Ramst wrote:
> 
> Alexander Enzmann wrote:
> >
> > Of course it takes Bertrand Russel a couple of hundred
> > pages in his Principles of Mathematics to get to the point that you can
> > show that 1 + 1 = 2.
> >
> > Xander
> 
> Does it serve any practical purpose or is it of purely philosophical value?

While Russell hoped to prove the consistency of math through logic, he
wound up with one of the more famous paradoxes in math (stated at
another point in this thread).  His principles of math are for people
who want to understand the foundations rather than memorizing things.

[Desparately thinking of a way to get this back to povray......  Ok I
have it but it's a stretch.]

Reading Russell (and contemporaries) lead to my reading a bunch of
history of Math books, which led to reading about the first techniques
found for solving cubics and quartics through radicals, which led to the
code I wrote for polynomials in POV-Ray.  [There, nearly back OT.]

Xander

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