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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Brian Rossiter
Mathematics gives rigour to a subject. The humanities have long sought a formal basis in logic and set theory especially in the understanding of language and linguistics. The axiomatic approach, however, has proved to be very limiting for representing human thought and behaviour. Constructive mathematics now offers category theory developed in the second half of this century as an all-embracing formal language which may prove to be the ultimate breakthrough the humanities have been long seeking. The paper 1 provides two examples - one at the very abstract level of adjointness between discourse in speech writing and the electronic format. At a much lower level the same mathematical formalism can represent methods of optimisation in organizing dictionary data on disk.
Author(s): Heather MA, Rossiter BN
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: Department of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 1994
Pages: 13
Print publication date: 01/03/1994
Source Publication Date: March 1994
Report Number: 476
Institution: Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/476.pdf