Re: Date's First Great Blunderhcgjy

lauri.pietarinen_at_atbusiness.com (Lauri Pietarinen) wrote in message news:<e9d83568.0404200114.77dd445d_at_posting.google.com>...

 [ snip ]

> It's like negative integers, rational and real numbers
> actually building ontop of the foundation of positive integers instead
> of claiming that they are useless.

    When you see someone apply the following syllogism, you know that   they're at the end of their rope.

1. Newtonian mechanics was superceded by relativistic mechanics; the later involving more complicated math.
2. My model is more complicated than yours.
3. Therefore, my model supercedes yours.

     This misses the truly profound thing about Isaac's contributions. He was    among the first scientists to apply mathematics with rigor and consistency    to answer the question "How does the world work?". Einstein (et al) used    Newton's big idea, that the world was amenable to mathematical descriptions.

    Given the originality of Newton's contribution, we ought to be comfortable    comparing Codd -- who applied mathematics to the question of how to manage    data -- with the former commisioner of the Royal Mint.

      I mean, compare the way some of the ideas under review are described    in this forum with:

     http://www.win.ua.ac.be/~hidders/pubs/dbpl2003-sat-xpath.pdf

      This (by our own Jan Hidders) is a first class piece of work. What it    does is to explain some really hard problems that need to be addressed by    people who build products based around XQuery/XPath. It is the embodiment    of rigor and (to my mind) shows just what happens when you whack    loosey-goosey thinking with the big club of formal reasoning. Received on Tue Apr 20 2004 - 19:17:47 CEST