Re: Extending my question. Was: The relational model and relationalalgebra - why did SQL become the industry standard?

"Lauri Pietarinen" <lauri.pietarinen_at_atbusiness.com> wrote in message news:3E4C1FF0.9020001_at_atbusiness.com... In short, logic and set theory together are only a tiny part of mathematics. Don't evangelize them.

  Well, not being a mathematician,
  but having studied some mathematics I was and   still am under the impression that all modern mathematics   is based on set theory which is equivalent with logic. Set Reductionalism is a dicease that I was ill when being a student. Although Sets and Logic certainly spice mathematics with rigour, they are mostly irrelevant for practioner mathematician not working in those fields.   Here is a quote from Wikipedia
  (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics)

<quote>

  The current dominant mathematical paradigm is based on axiomatic set theory and formal logic. Virtually all mathematical theorems today can be formulated as theorems of set theory. The truth of a mathematical statement, in this view, is then nothing but the claim that the statement can be derived from the axioms of set theory using the rules of formal logic.

<quote/>

There is a difference between "can" and "have to". Reductionalizm to sets might be unnatural, unpractical, etc. The famous example is the ordered pair definition

(a, b) := {{a}, {a, b}}

AFAIK, no mathematical theorem is reformulated to use the above set based definition instead of ordered pairs. Ordered tuple is widely considered to be a basic concept (including Relational Theory;-). Received on Thu Feb 13 2003 - 17:23:48 CST