whpearson comments on Seeking education - Less Wrong

8 Post author: APMason 17 February 2012 12:55AM

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Comment author: whpearson 17 February 2012 01:45:02AM *  0 points [-]

I'm somewhere a long this path, so I can share my experiences. Something worth playing with is Coq, I enjoyed doing the most of course here. One benefit is that it uses a consistent notation to represent things and not too many unfamiliar symbols. It introduces things like the Peano axioms and other interesting stuff. It will also nail down commutativity, transitivity and other useful concepts. Not sure how useful it is, if you haven't done some programming.

For learning important symbols and terminology, I would look at Set theory. Knowing the difference between "member of" symbol and "subset of" symbol of is fairly basic stuff, I just picked it up by osmosis. Predicate calculus also crops up a fair bit, I got taught it in my computing degree. I've got Conceptual Mathematics because I found a fair amount of the maths around functional programming languages was expressed in terms on Category Theory. It was good for the first few chapters but my interest waned at some point and I find it hard to get back into,

I'm interested what other people would recommend.

Comment author: APMason 17 February 2012 02:19:27AM 0 points [-]

As far as programming goes, pretty much anything that can be done with Game Maker 7, I can do, and I know a bit of Python. Formal logic-wise, I have Greg Restall's "Introduction to..." (I have a B.A. in Philosophy, on of the modules of which was formal logic). Thank you for the advice.

Comment author: whpearson 17 February 2012 02:43:43AM *  1 point [-]

You should be able to cope with coq, I think. I think just going up to the logic section would be useful, the rest is only really relevant for heavy program proving. Let us know how you get on and what you find useful.

If you are in London I can lend you Conceptual Mathematics, if you want.

Comment author: APMason 17 February 2012 02:48:04AM 0 points [-]

I'm not in London, I'm afraid, or even close to it. Thank you anyway. I'll reply again to this post or send a PM when I've gotten through it.

Comment author: Anubhav 18 February 2012 01:25:07PM *  1 point [-]

If you are in London I can lend you Conceptual Mathematics, if you want.

I'm not in London, I'm afraid, or even close to it. Thank you anyway.

wink wink nudge nudge

Try not to go broke buying textbooks.