Gauss Reading

" Proof not in the sense of the lawyers who set half proofs equal to a whole one but in the sense of the mathematician where 1/2 proof=0 and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible."

I picked this quote because it made me think, I don't fully understand it but it seems to have some interesting content. When I first read the quote it made me think about how in the "real world" we always have ideas assumptions and thoughts of course but it seems to me that the quote above is saying that if we have a argument or something that we have to prove when trying to convey to a audience or get someone to believe what you are trying to argue you could use the same tactic that lawyers do which is as long as you have two half proof put them together and present them as one. That's something that is maybe or maybe not effective in the real world but in a mathematics eyes that does equal to nothing. I think that's why he added the equation in for more of a visual aspect. if you only have half of the proof its not enough to make it true.

My question for this is what makes it okay for us to accepted half of the truth in the real world if it in high sight is equal to nothing as Gauss says to his friend above. The quote that he says to me makes more sense then believe two half truths , it also makes me lean more to I need full proof before I believe something. For an example in math my teacher always makes us prove an equation before we are allowed to use it. We have to explain exactly why something is the way it is. Like the Pythagorean theorem we would have to draw out the triangle and explain each side and how Pythagorean came up with the equation. which is something I can now respect, at first I was the first one to critique this way of learning math because I thought that it was pointless in learning the proof of it as long as I knew someone smart made it for me to use. After analyzing this quote his way of going about this sounds a little more reasonable.

Euler Reading

"In his treatise of 1736 he was the first to explicitly introduce the concept of a mass-point particle and he was also the first to study the acceleration of a particle moving along any curve."


I liked this quote because its crazy to think about how his mind could wonder to find the "mass point" of a particle something so small. Its also crazy because he would have had to be very dedicated in order to stick to even getting close to finding some that could lead him to a point where he could teach others about and how to get to the point he did finding the mass point.

In a way he is very interesting I would die to hear the stories of how of some of his inspiration and most famous work came about. He couldn't of one day just woke up and thought that he should find the mass point of a particle , or how a hollow surface made with then rubber makes the surface smoother. These are kind of randomly picked in my book, its not like in math class when my teacher writes something on the board "unknown" like dividing zero by zero makes me wonder why that is unknown and impossible so far, but the thought leaves as soon as it comes then I'm on to thinking about the next thing. But he stuck with a thought enough to get some answers from it and I think that's amazing.