jackg (05/14/82)
The paper referred to by Jerry is authored by Richard DeMillo, Richard Lipton and Alan Perlis and is in May 1979 Communications of the ACM, pp 271 through 280 and titled "Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs". It presents some very controversial issues and caused the largest flood of letters to the Forum section of the magazine I can remember. These letters are also worth reading. To believe the authors is to believe that the soundness of the structure called mathematics is more a belief on the part of mathematicians than a universal fact. I think that this is the idea that Dijkstra found "ugly". All papers published in learned journals should be this ugly. Jack Gjovaag Tek Labs Tektronix