Burke distrusted abstract formulas, dismissing France's Declaration of the Rights of Man as "paltry and blurred sheets of paper".
(5) Because legal customs were generally known, the collections focused on explaining individual cases, using them as examples or precedents, and did not attempt to present general, abstract formulas.
In his view, the invocation of such abstract formulas as Marxism and anarchism, in the hope that one specific Western doctrine would solve all of China's problems, was futile; in coping with real issues he felt they would most likely lead to disastrous consequences.
This idea was prominent in A Fragment on Government, where he argued that effective government was not to be had on the foundation of abstract formulas such as "mixed and balanced" institutions, but required "the frequent and easy changes of condition between governors and governed; whereby the interests of one class are more or less indistinguishably blended with those of the other" (1977, 485).
Therefore, we designed an experiment using functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) to investigate the syntactic processing of abstract mathematical formulae and termini, written in a standard first-order language.
Here we provide brain-imaging evidence that the syntactic processing of abstract mathematical formulae, written in a first order language, is, indeed efficient and effective as a rule-based generation and decision process.
As Ms. Samuel explains in the illuminating book she edited to accompany the show, the implications of fractals didn't become clear until Mr. Mandelbrot began to collaborate with computer programmers to create graphic representations of certain kinds of purely abstract mathematical formulas.
This might seem in contradiction with our linear valuation rule for cash flows or with the additive appearance of the abstract FVA formula (4).
The abstract Poisson summation formula also holds under certain integrability conditions [76].
