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John Baez (Sep 18 2025 at 22:11):Can anyone give me a copy of this paper?
The nLab has a link to this paper on their article [[Bob Walters]], but the link isn't working:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.51.5758&rep=rep1&type=pdf
I can't find it on CiteSeer, either.
David Egolf (Sep 18 2025 at 22:17):It looks like that link was archived on Wayback Machine: link
John Baez (Sep 18 2025 at 22:18):Hurrah! That's the worst scan of a paper that I've ever seen, but it's better than nothing. If I had Adobe Acrobat or something, maybe I could turn up the contrast.
John Baez (Sep 18 2025 at 22:29):It's got a fun passage claiming that the origin of "algebra" is a word meaning "bone-setting", and arguing that algebra is like bone-setting in that it's the reunification of syntax and semantics - the sort of thing I can imagine Walters saying.
David Michael Roberts (Sep 19 2025 at 00:07):John Baez said:
It's got a fun passage claiming that the origin of "algebra" is a word meaning "bone-setting", and arguing that algebra is like bone-setting in that it's the reunification of syntax and semantics - the sort of thing I can imagine Walters saying.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AC%D8%A8%D8%B1#Arabic is the ancestor of our word 'algebra' and yes, it was used to describe setting broken bones.
Matt Earnshaw (Sep 19 2025 at 05:22):for the record, with Mario we made an archive of Walters' papers available here: https://github.com/mroman42/walters
I'll add this to his nLab page.
John Baez (Sep 19 2025 at 07:58):Great! His nLab page had some dead links. And your GitHub site has a better scan of On the algebra of systems with feedback and boundary!