Re: integers and arrays inJava - how?

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 12:54:07 -0500, "Rhino"
<no.offline.contact.please@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote, quoted or indirectly
quoted someone who said :


Asking you to do the impossible is a valid thing to do as a learning point
and I've heard of it happening before. It still doesn't seem likely that it
was involved in the question that the original poster asked.

Our math teacher did that to us. I spend the Easter holidays chewing
on the solution and I solved it , with about 10 pages of densely
packed algebra. The problem was not impossible, just a university
level problem usually solved with trigonometry which we had not
studied. I don't think I have ever got so much positive feedback in my
life as a few days after I turned in my solution and the teacher
discovered it was correct. They sent my work to the local university.
I later got to have lunch with department heads.

My approach was far from elegant. It just nibbled away at my overall
strategy of computing an area by two different methods then equating
them and solving. It was completely unlike any math proof I had ever
seen. I began to wonder how many theorems were out there unproved only
because the proof was long and messy and mathematicians had such an
aversion to that. I speculated way back then than some day computers
might formalise the rules of theorem proving and discover proofs by
taking very tiny steps, not caring at all about elegance. That has
since come true. What I wanted were very clear rules on what was
kosher in proving and what was not. I figured we would never get
fully clear unless we formulated the rules in a computer program.

Even starting back in grade 7 with geometric proofs I was deeply
bothered that proofs always seemed to use a trick that may be obvious
but certainly was not mentioned in the axioms as legit. It seemed to
me, you might was well just assume the theorem as allow some new trick
of logic. I loved computers. The rules were so clear and so without
loopholes in comparison with those of math.





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