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Author: CodexDerelict

otnm/physicsenvy.html

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             <i>"Precisely constructed models for linguistic structure can play an important role, both negative and positive, in the process of discovery itself. By pushing a precise but inadequate formulation to an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the exact source of this inadequacy and, consequently, gain a deeper understanding of the linguistic data. More positively, a formalized theory may automatically provide solutions for many problems other than those for which it was explicitly designed. Obscure and intuition-bound notions can neither lead to absurd conclusions nor provide new and correct ones, and hence they fail to be useful in two important respects. I think that some of those linguists who have questioned the value of precise and technical development of linguistic theory have failed to recognize the productive potential in the method of rigorously stating a proposed theory and applying it strictly to linguistic material with no attempt to avoid unacceptable conclusions by ad hoc adjustments or loose formulation."
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 —Noam Chomsky</i> 
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 I come from linguistics, which is often grouped among the social and natural sciences and has had a storied history with mathematics in many forms. Semantics takes inspiration from predicate logic and set theory (and more recently linear algebra), syntax takes inspiration from graph theory, variationist sociolinguistics makes use of frequentist statistics, Bayesian phylogenetics from evolutionary biology has been used in the typological analysis of language families, and those are just a few examples out of many, many more. The use of computational analysis for languages has only added more mathematics into linguistics. One good empirical example is the Vesuvius Challenge, where the charred remains of a library in Herculaneum (modern day Ercolano) discovered in the 1700s were only recently partially deciphered with machine learning based optical character recognition. Another would be the use of stylometric analysis in forensics, ransom notes and manifestos being uncovered through the writer's word choices, sentence constructions and spellings, partly what got the Unabomber caught.