Forum Overview :: Devil May Cry 4 :: The supplied answers are skeezy and freshmannicky.

[quote name="Zsenitan"]The purpose of mathetmatics is to complete abstraction. (It is a brute force method ^_^ And a compulsion: we are set on the path by neurotic-neurochemical tendency to reify, to demand answers like Gawd and Fate to questions like "why did I break my leg.") The important abstraction is "perfection." You can't have it or see it or anything like that, you only know that it exists - somehow, if only conceptually. If you want to get at it in any tangible way, you will have to build a tower up to it - a system for describing it and for attaining it. Religion is going about this one way and physics the other; coincidentally, they both get a lot of mileage out of numerological coincidences. Most of algebraic mathematics is tower-building towards the abstraction "identity", in that it evolves out of, and towards, the idea of one thing being alone and itself, and then many such things, and then ways to split and group the individuals and redfine them. Analytical mathematics is more about "difference", geometry is about "space", and topography is about "unity".... roughly. If I could think of ten of these, I would have a sweet poster on my hands. The tower towards perfection must be built with bricks which are themselves towers, and perfection itself is a brick in the tower towards the abstraction "abstraction", along with all the other bricks that can ever be thought of, including abstraction itself. I think people will never even get out of building the tower for perfection. But if we ever <i>finished</i> math, we would be able to discuss abstractions with a knowledge of them as firm, thorough, and palpable as your mouth's knowledge of an apple.[/quote]