>RAH

Who I presume is someone famous who i am aware of but whose name doesn't 
spring to mind.

> once said that humans who can't do at least calculas are at best animals.

He/she may have, but if so was/is an idiot. The point is taken but you don't 
have to be capable of using a trick that Newton dredged up over a weekend* 
to solve a problem ** to be very much human. Such quotes are, from the 
quoter,  lazy conveniences and/or elitist rubbish. Now if Nietzsche has said 
it ... ;-)  *** ).

Ah. Click. Bzzzt. Heinlein. Yep. He was capable of elitist rubbish when he 
wanted to be :-). May sound a bit rough calling RAH an idiot, but praise 
where praise is due.

A slightly better observation (IMHO as always) is Socrates' "The unexamined 
life is not worth living". In fact, I think that gives you a far far better 
(although necessarily imperfect) picture of the man/animal divide than does 
calculus. The overwhelming majority of humanity are capable of self 
examination, regardless of whether they make use of the ability. The 
overwhelming majority of animals are not.

> I've always like the
> quote about the lottery being a tax on people who are bad at math.

Indeed. But some few of the those bad mathematicians are extremely happy 
with their choice.



        RM


* Newton allegedly developed calculus over a weekend to solve an apparently 
intractable problem that had been proposed by a colleague. The answer was 
published anonymously. Nobody was fooled. The "trick"  turned out to be an 
extremely useful one ;-)

** "The tiger is known by its claws" or similar was the comment re the 
authorship of the paper. Google refuses to yield a proper quote. (Stripes?).

*** Everything that Nietzsche said is necessarily rubbish, as he himself 
would have agreed. (Regardless of the truth or not of his foundational 
proposition)


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