MATHEMATICAL RIGOR IN PHYSICS

When I studied modern algebra as an undergraduate, the instructor, Professor Ellis Kolchin, contemptuously defined a physicist as “someone who thinks that a vector is an ordered triple.” Roughly at the same time, Murray Gell-Mann was arguing that, really, physicists do not need to know mathematics,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProof and Knowledge in Mathematics pp. 105 - 113
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published United Kingdom Routledge 1992
Taylor & Francis Group
Subjects
Mathematical logic
Philosophy of mathematics
Divergent Integrals
Magnetic Moment
Continuous Energy Spectra
Critical Exponent
Kepler’s Laws
Infinitesimal Rotations
Berkeley
Half Plane
Quantum Field Theory
String Theory
Natural Numbers
Consistent Formal System
Harmonic Series
Violate
Follow
Mathematical Justification
Mathematical Rigor
Power Series
Held
Infinite Power Series
Quantum Electrodynamics
Dimensional Regularization
Bishop Berkeley
Mathematical Expression
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ISBN9780415068055
0415068053
DOI10.4324/9780203979105-13

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Summary:When I studied modern algebra as an undergraduate, the instructor, Professor Ellis Kolchin, contemptuously defined a physicist as “someone who thinks that a vector is an ordered triple.” Roughly at the same time, Murray Gell-Mann was arguing that, really, physicists do not need to know mathematics, since the drive for abstraction and rigor characteristic of modern mathematics is only to avoid recondite counterexamples that never appear in nature.1 While these two statements probably could not be made today —we live in the era of string theory, whose practitioners no longer know whether they are doing physics or mathematics-they do reflect an attitude by physicists to both mathematical abstraction and mathematical rigor.
ISBN:9780415068055
0415068053
DOI:10.4324/9780203979105-13