Date: Tue, 26 Apr 94 13:44:46 PDT From: "Scott L. Burson" <gyro@zeta-soft.com>

Date: Tue, 26 Apr 94 09:19:01 EDT From: Peter Freyd <pjf@saul.cis.upenn.edu>

It seems that somewhere between 284 and 305 Diocletian proclaimed:

Artem geometriae discere atque exercere publice interest, ars autem mathematica damnabilis interdicta est omnino.

Does that say what I think it does? Can someone supply an authoritative translation?

Yep, it means just what it looks like:

To learn and practice the art of geometry is publicly of interest, but the damnable mathematical art is proscribed altogether.

-- Scott

Appearances might be misleading. What precisely were the meanings of "geometria" and "mathematica" in Diocletian times? I suspect that "geometria" encompassed what we would call the whole of mathematics as known then, while "mathematica" was a branch of sorcery (benign as well as malign, ie. both white and black) that involved much high-fallutin' twiddling of symbols, mysterious diagrams and geometric figures, and such -- thus a kind of formalized abstract magick. (Some recent literature on uses of category theory in computer science in general and in AI in particular would be basic manuals, as it were, for those mathematically inclined sorcerers. They could use them quite effectively even if they would not understand what it's all about, since they could always pretend they do, and they were masters of illusionism.) Can somebody tell whether this is a good enough guess? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ France Dacar Email: france.dacar@ijs.si Computer Science Department Phone: +386 61 1-259-199 / 768 Jozef Stefan Institute Fax: +386 61 1-258-058 Jamova 39, 61000 Ljubljana, Slovenia