- - Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 10:29:57 -0500 - From: Peter Freyd <pjf@saul.cis.upenn.edu> - ................................. - - The actual elements used for a mathematical construction are never of - interest. Imagine your reaction to an interruption at the beginning of - a lecture on number theory, "Which construction of the natural numbers - do you have in mind? Russell's or Van Neumann's?" My favorite example - of the sort of perverse question one can ask if one were to take - formal set theory seriously is "Does any simple group appear as a zero - of the Riemann Zeta function?" - - My point exactly. The elements don't matter, so why should elementhood be taken as the fundamental relation of all of mathematics? Equality doesn't matter either, but equivalence relations do.