Well, like Mr Tea said you could do stuff like measure its curvature at a given point or work out its length or whatever and that would be an analysis of a kind I think. You could then compare its curvature to another line or whatever if you're interested in relationships to other things. I don't think that you could come up with a single neat function to describe it but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, why would it?"By analyze, I just mean figure out its relationship to other stuff. As in, wobbly lines exist. How do people understand them mathematically? What mathematical operations are performed on them in order to try and understand them?"
Because maths knows only functions?
I don't think that's true. It's certainly not true that it only knows "single neat functions" which is what I said."Because maths knows only functions?"
Well, the line in question obviously has no volume or area in itself, you could have a shape of which that line made up one edge and you could ask the same kinds of questions about the shapes that resulted. Again they might not be simply describable (nb you can fairly easily work out the volume of most shapes by seeing how much water they displace but I guess that's not the kind of answer you mean)."A wobbly line has a relationship to other mathematical properties - area, volume, angle, point, curve. Basically, I'm interested in the relationships between mathematical properties, in figuring out how they fit together."
Yes of course but the point is that it's hard to say anything more about it than that. That's exactly what I meant by ad hoc."A wiggly line can be described by a continuous function between the set of real numbers occupying the interval 0 <= x <= 1 and a set of points in a Euclidian space. The function takes 0 to the start of the line, 1 to the end of it, and continuously maps all of the points in the interval to points along the wiggly path."
I don't think anyone is saying that that other line is unmathematical. You can have far more complex lines that are nowhere continuous or nowhere differentiable or whatever but I think that if you have a rule for generating it there is some sense in which you have an understanding of it that you don't have with the random wiggle (of course it's perfectly possible that any given apparently random wiggle may be generated by a generalisable rule but I'm not aware of any systematic method to discover what that rule is)."Some lines wiggle more than others. A Koch curve, for instance, has wiggles on its wiggles, and so on ad infinitum. But that makes it more, rather than less, "mathematical"."
I don't get what you're saying here? Recurring decimals don't terminate, they recur and any numbers which can't be written as a ratio (ie are irrational) are non-terminating and non-recurring.
i'm saying there are no terminating numbers
0.999999...
A bit like I think."Ad hoc" here seems to mean something a bit like Kolmogorov randomness.
I'm not sure. I don't think that "most" could be broken down into a way that would count as an analysis of the kind that Josef K was requesting."I would imagine that most wiggly lines I could draw by hand on the back of an envelope would turn out to be quite compressible - it would be quite a challenge to produce one that couldn't be broken down into a handful of frequencies."
Do you mean that terminating numbers can be written in a form in which they don't terminate? That might be true but I don't see how that means that there are no terminating numbers."I'm saying there are no terminating numbers"
Every number has a non-terminating representation, in a given base. Some numbers also have terminating representations in that base, while some do not. I'm not sure I understand what the fuss is about.
Not if you use the number in question as the base presumably."But of course irrationals are irrational in any base."
Not if you use the number in question as the base presumably.
I think that the only reason you would do it (off the top of my head) is if you wanted to make, say, pi rational but you would be sacrificing an awful lot in terms of simplicity for most things. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible though."Well I was thinking that, but I can't really see why you'd do that."