KP> Mathematics is the part of science you could continue to do
if you woke up tomorrow and discovered the universe was gone.
(I do not know the author of this elegant definition put on the
web by Dave Rusin at
http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/index/beginners.html.)
I propose to qualify a "bit of culture" as mathematical, iff it
represents a fixed (self-contained) model of "something", i.e. a
model already detached from this "something".
I'm trying to defend this point of view in my online book at
http://www.ltn.lv/~podnieks/ .
Best wishes,
Karlis Podnieks
podnieks@cclu.lv
University of Latvia
Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science