Posted by Elizabeth on November 20, 1999, at 5:31:27
In reply to Zheezh! You turn your back for a second ..., posted by Bob on November 18, 1999, at 13:51:46
> Elizabeth, thanks for those URLs. Don't tell me your dad is a defender of the (positivitist-empiricist) faith?! That's so passe! As for the bio of Laplace, I found it quite amusing to see that it was taken from A Short Account of the History of Mathematics. It doesn't mention Laplace's rather bitter feud with Newton over who "discovered" calculus (for those who don't know, Laplace developed integral calculus at the same time that Newton produced differential calculus).
No, that was Leibniz. http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Leibniz/RouseBall/RB_Leibnitz.html
(Hence the two notations for the derivative!)
> I could produce a chain of events leading from plain, carbon-rich compounds towards amino acids and the pseudo-living interactions they can have on their own all the way up to single celled life, I'm much rather take a shot at having a room full of an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters whose task is to reproduce the King James Bible.
I thought the complete works of Shakespeare was the traditional goal of such experiments.
poster:Elizabeth
thread:14368
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/19991108/msgs/15558.html