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ABSTRACT

Dominic Behan once asked me in a rare sober moment (for both of us): “What’s the point of knowing something if others don’t know that you know it?”1 To which I replied with the familiar, “It’s not what you don’t know that matters, it’s what you know that ain’t so.” I was reminded of these dubious epistemological observations while reading Stephen Sparkes’ interview with Steve Ross-Talbot in the March 2006 issue of ACM Queue.2 In promoting Robin Milner’s pi-calculus as the provably reliable backbone for BPM (business process management), Ross-Talbot eases our fears of the arcane, abstract pi-calculus axiomatics by stressing that the layman/programmer “would never need to see the algorithms...never need to read the literature, unless you were having trouble sleeping at night.”

REFERENCES

• 1: In literary computing you are allowed to drop names as well as digits. Astute readers will notice that I have bowdlerized Dom's raw brogue where unprintable words of industrial strength are freely interspersed for emphasis.
• 2: Charlene O'Hanlon, A conversation with Steve Ross-Talbot, Queue, v.4 n.2, March 2006 [doi>10.1145/1122674.1122684]
• 3: Formerly Alexander Pope's "Pierian Spring," until my advertising contract with Perrier, the well-known fizzy-water-bottling company from Vergèze, France.
• 4: Becerra, L, Barnes, R. 2005. Evolution of mathematical certainty. Math Horizons 13 (September), Mathematical Association of America; http:// www.maa.org/mathhorizons. A splendid but pessimistic summary from Thales to Cook via Leibniz, Kant, Turing, Cohen, et al.
• 5: Pyke, J., Whitehead, R. 2003. Does better math lead to better business processes? http://www.wfmc.org/standards/docs/better_maths_better_processes.pdf.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  A. General Literature
  A.m MISCELLANEOUS

Additional Classification:
  F. Theory of Computation
  F.2 ANALYSIS OF ALGORITHMS AND PROBLEM COMPLEXITY
      F.2.1 Numerical Algorithms and Problems
          Subjects: Number-theoretic computations (e.g., factoring, primality testing)
  F.4 MATHEMATICAL LOGIC AND FORMAL LANGUAGES
      F.4.m Miscellaneous

General Terms:
Theory