>mathematician tells you he has proven something >he shows

How does this differ from just reading the Bible and saying that God created the world in 7 days 5000 years ago? That's paper and black lines and dots also.

Nah, this is not the right bait.

No one studies math here

>>8641084
this is much better bait

>>8641081
Because nature doesn't obey the Bible, dork

>>8641076
>the nature obeys that paper
>he didn't do a single experiment
When mathematicians prove things, they're proving things about mathematical concepts. The black lines and dots rigorously represent ideas about mathematical structures and their manipulation must obey the rules of logic. This means that if you are a logical being, you should be convinced of the truth of a mathematical argument expressed in lines and dots that contains only lawful manipulations of those lines and dots.

Now, sometimes it turns out that a mathematical concept models something in nature well: for example, discrete countable objects in the natural world like apples behave like the natural numbers when you add them together, remove them from each other, etc. Sometimes it turns out that a mathematical concept does not model something in nature well: for example, there are non-standard models of arithmetic that contain non-standard numbers and apples do not behave like those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_model_of_arithmetic

The difference is determined by experiment. If you went to the store and put one apple in your bag and then added a second to it and ended up with some number of apples other than two, you would have evidence against the usefulness of the naturals for modelling things like apples.

Putting this all together: if you are a logical person, and if you accept that apples behave like the naturals, then if I show you a lawful mathematical proof written in lines and dots that proves some statement about the naturals, you should be convinced that I have proven something about apples in the natural world.

>>8641084
I study ancient Greek geometry exclusively.

Ask me anything.

>>8641443
Geometry is for squares

>>8641451
If im the square, you are the distance from the vertex to the ordinate times the parameter, because I'm the ordinate of a parabola, not an ellipse or hyperbola

oh god my head

>>8641076

And his paper is a piece of garbage unless backed by empirical evidence.

We might call this said piece of paper a hypothesis.

>>8641081
so both are a religion

>>8641537

Well, at least one is probably testable, based on logic, and based on some a priori evidence/knowledge.

The Bible is the exact opposite. Much of it is untestable and flies in the face of all human knowledge and logic. In fact, historical evidence suggests that it is some amalgam of Jewish faith and paganism (e.g. Easter, Christmas, etc.). And evidence suggests that no one knew about the bible until they were enslaved and their resistance slaughtered.

math:
define rules ->
analyze implications of rules ->
findings.
The proof means that a system that matches the description of the rules, behaves like them, and thus the findings are true for that system.