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Old February 1st 05, 04:50 PM
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Mark James Boyd wrote:
...
P.S. By the way, what does "reducio ad absurdum" mean? My wife said it
to me, but I don't speak Italian...can someone translate?
...


This is not Italian, this is Latin and should be spelled "reductio ad absurdum"
(with a "t"). The litteral translation, as you can guess is "reducing to nonsense",
a method often used in mathematical proofs which consist in assuming that the
opposite of what you want to prove is true and deducing from that some contradiction
(absurdity or "absurdum" in Latin).