Timeline for Why doesn't mathematics collapse even though humans quite often make mistakes in their proofs?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
6 events
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| Aug 20, 2019 at 10:23 | comment | added | Carsten Führmann | @MattF. I suspect, somewhat undermining myself, that hacking is an aspect where my analogy breaks down. From the top of my head, I can't think of major cases where mathematics was hacked. But I might be overlooking something. | |
| Aug 19, 2019 at 19:58 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | I think that this is a very good analogy, and I would take it a step further. It's the modularity of software, rather than the redundancy (as mentioned by others) that gives it a lot of robustness. The internals of a module are shielded from the rest of the world by its interface. Often, a bug in a module affects only certain parameter values and so the damage the bug does to the whole edifice is limited. One can often fix a bug just by patching a module, without having to rewrite the entire software from scratch. | |
| Aug 19, 2019 at 17:31 | comment | added | user44143 | Also: the greater the user base, the more likely will critical bugs be exploited by hackers. It's not all stability in this analogy. | |
| Aug 19, 2019 at 16:10 | review | First posts | |||
| Aug 19, 2019 at 16:14 | |||||
| S Aug 19, 2019 at 16:06 | history | answered | Carsten Führmann | CC BY-SA 4.0 | |
| S Aug 19, 2019 at 16:06 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Carsten Führmann |