Talk:Typographical Number Theory

From Oleg Alexandrov's talk page

The following discussion was copied from User talk:Oleg Alexandrov. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 15:51, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

What does it mean when a user has a name but it is red-linked? There is a user with these qualities who is being something of a nuisance on Peano axioms. Randall Holmes 18:23, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

This means that this user did not create a user page for himself. Since most serious users do create a user page, the one you are talking about is perhaps not a serious user (or just too new to understand user page creation), which could explain his behavior. --Meni Rosenfeld 18:54, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Randall, what do you think of Typographical Number Theory, created by the same user? --Jitse Niesen (talk) 19:03, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

I (Holmes) suspect that Typographical Number Theory should be deleted: it is a specific formal implementation of Peano arithmetic found in Hofstadter's book, and an article on it is redundant. But while I am a mathematical logician of long standing, I am a Wikipedian of quite short standing and will defer to others on this kind of question. Randall Holmes 22:23, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

I asked Charles Steward for his opinion, see User talk:Chalst#Typographical Number Theory. I'm afraid that the finer points of logic, like the differences between Peano arithmetic and a implementation of Peano arithmetic, are beyond my understanding. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 23:49, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

• Hi, thanks Jitse. Why don't we just make it a redirect to Peano arithmetic, and put a brief note about Hofstadter's book somewhere? If the nuisance user keeps recreating the page, then we AfD it, but I'd generally prefer to avoid the bureaucracy. --- --- Charles Stewart^(talk) 02:30, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with having a page on Hofstadter's formulation, provided it's accurate and provided it doesn't characterize it as mathematically original. There could be lots of readers who have read GEB and would benefit from having an article that puts Hofstadter's version of PA into context and relates it to more standard treatments. --Trovatore 02:30, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

• I agree with Trovatore that there's nothing wrong with having a page on TNT with the indicated caveats. Randall Holmes 19:53, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

symbols

It appears that we are having problems with some of the symbols used on this page, particluarly under "Quantifiers", which reads: "There are two quantifiers used: (square box) and (square box)", where clearly symbols were intended. Perhaps someone can confirm whether they also see this problem in a few days, or it may be a temporary issue. User:Graldensblud 21:55, 10 May 2006 (GMT+1)

Call for more examples

Hello. I'm having difficulty with the more challenging translation exercises in Hofstadter's chapter on TNT, particularly 'b is a power of 2' and 'b is a power of 10'. I have been unsuccessful in looking for a reference with the solutions to these puzzles. Perhaps they could be provided here? Bchabala2 (talk) 14:38, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

"b is a power of 2" is equivalent to "b has no prime factors other than 2", or "there is no a such that SSSa is prime and SSSa divides b". I'm sure you could complete the translation into TNT notation from there. "b is a power of 10" is much harder and I haven't solved it yet.... 91.105.3.82 (talk) 00:20, 18 September 2008 (UTC)