CronoDAS comments on Mathematical simplicity bias and exponential functions - Less Wrong

12 Post author: taw 26 August 2009 06:34PM

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Comment author: Johnicholas 27 August 2009 10:29:09AM 3 points [-]

Under the usual mathematical meanings of "continuous", "function" and so on, this is strictly false. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weierstrass_function

It might be true under some radically intuitionist interpretation (a family of philosophies I have a lot of sympathy with). For example, I believe Brouwer argued that all "functions" from "reals" to "reals" are "continuous", though he was using his own interpretation of the terms inside of quotes. However, such an interpretation should probably be explained rather than assumed. ;)

Comment author: CronoDAS 27 August 2009 07:24:18PM 0 points [-]

Yeah, you're right. I think I needed to say any analytic function, or something like that.