From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Fri Jul 21 2000 - 22:55:45 MDT
> GBurch1@aol.com wrote:
>
> > In a discussion in another forum, the question of whether computers have
> > "found" valid mathematical proofs has come up.
Greg, in 1981 I was working for the math department at college
as a tutor and coder grunt for the HP3000. The university bought
a new PDP11-750 and disbursed funds to each of the department
heads to purchase software. Every major immediately found suitable
software except one, and it wasnt the Home Economics {for they
immediately put into practice the canonical home application touted
in 1980, putting recipes on the home computer}. The one college
that was nearly at a loss to figure out how to use a computer was...
mathematics. {8^D
They finally bought a few lame programs, something like a very
feeble precursor to what we would now call mathematica, a still more
feeble precursor to modern spreadsheets, and some modelling/
visualization software that was actually pretty decent.
And that, young people, was how it was in those days. spike
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