[Om3] Symbol Definitions in the Description elements

[Chris Rowley]

James

> I attach a (slightly updated0 version of the paper that was
> the background of what I said at Linz/Hagenberg.

Thanks for this!  It makes a lot of sense to me as a

 'working mathematician with pragmatic interests in computer aided
  maths research but a normally healthy scepticism about the utility
  of reducing real-world maths to strict logic'.

With this hat on I am currently not agreeing with your conclusions
about the necessity of 'uniqueness' at the end.  It seems to me that,
pragmatically if not formally, it is no more difficult to make a
'human check' on the 'mathematical consistency' of two practical
definitions than it is to check that there are no cycles in 'the
dependency graph' starting a definition or that a recursive definition
gives a computable function.

Thus I would allow multiple definitions but insist that they are
compatible.

Moving on, one could usefully insist on a _mathematical_ proof of all
of such things: compatibility, non-cyclicity, finiteness etc.  Or not!


chris

PS: the distinction between a 'mathematical definition' and 'an
evaluation method' can often be, pedagogically, very subtle and
perhaps needs to be better understood by the creators of the
descriptive parts of the MathML CDs.