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| Martin Gardner |
In an article published in Discover magazine in
1985, Martin Gardner wrote this:
As it happens, the
thousandth decimal of pi is 9... The question: Was [this assertion] true before
the 1949 calculation? To those of the realist school, the sentence expresses a
timeless truth whether anyone knows it or not... [Others] prefer to think of
mathematical objects as having no reality independent of the human mind.
This problem is quite old, as we have been
discussing it for over two thousand years. The question about whether
mathematical objects really exist or are a pure creation of our mind is a
particular case of another problem, much more general, that debates whether
ideas and concepts (like the dog species) really exist, or just this
dog and that dog exist. This is the problem of
universals, famous in the Middle Ages, which has not yet been
solved to everyone’s satisfaction. In fact, at present, this debate is more
virulent than ever.
