I assume you are not a mathematician or scientist, I’ll bet you are a [poor] philosopher.
Just out of curiosity, what exactly is required to claim oneself a ‘mathematician’. If all you need to do, for instance, is to sit on your duff in classrooms taking notes from a lecture and then later doing math assignments from a textbook, then elementary school kids qualify as ‘mathematicians’. If you need to pass ‘advanced’ mathematics courses to qualify as a mathematician, where is that line drawn? Is simple addition advanced enough? Is algebra advanced? Trigonometry? Calculus? Advanced Fornier transforms? Euler and Navier-Stokes equations? Grassman Algebras? DeRham cohomology? Riemannian geometry? Where is the magical line between ‘someone who has taken a lot of math classes’, and the leviathan of hyperintelligence called a ‘mathematician’? And what is the precise moment of transformation? What are the precise concepts that fuel this cosmological transformation?
It should be a fairly easily mental progression for hyperintelligence brigade to articulate.
Of necessity I’ve played with equations — I got just a hair beyond calculus and into differential equations before I switched majors in college (a few centuries ago) –- but for the life of me I don’t understand why taking a few more classes, be it 5, 10, or 20, would somehow have then mystically transformed me into someone vastly more qualified than everyone else on the planet to understand and comment on all that cannot be measured or inferred.
Please explain.
