Pythagoras' Law?
Pythagoras' Law?
Pythagoras’ famous theory - which has long been proven and should be made into mathematical law - will never be, because the therm ‘Pythagorean Theorem’ sounds so pleasing.
8 comments
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A mathematical law is very different from a theorem. A law is something that is fundamentally accepted to be true but it cannot be proven. A theorem can be proven to be true (or false) using the laws of mathematics.
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English being weird strikes again. You’d think they’d be swapped but no.
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English was not engineered from the ground up to be sensible and consistent. Instead it evolved slowly over time, as new things got tacked on year after year, and other things died out or drifted in pronunciation.
Here's what Middle English sounded like:
"Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour."
-Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
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I think this is straight forward. In our everyday life laws aren't derived from something else either. They just are. And OP seemed to have a hierarchical view of them as well. They were just under the assumption that a theorem could be "promoted".
I guess a real-life analogy would be a judge making a ruling under some laws. That would make a precedent in many countries but not a law. If then a new law were passed it could invalidate that precedent similar to someone disproving a theorem.
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A law is something that is fundamentally accepted to be true but it cannot be proven.
Counterexamples: The law of sines and law of cosines in trigonometry.
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Math laws are basically axioms, which means Assumptions we hold to be true.... meaning they are unprovable, if you could prove them from other axioms, then they would be theories and you wouldn't have to make a new assumption.
Everything else is built up on the assumptions and are called theories, assuming the axioms are correct.
8 comments