Ambiguity - Mathematical Interpretation of Ambiguity

Mathematical Interpretation of Ambiguity

In mathematics and logic, ambiguity can be considered to be an underdetermined system (of equations or logic) – for example, leaves open what the value of X is – while its opposite is a self-contradiction, also called inconsistency, paradoxicalness, or oxymoron, in an overdetermined system – such as, which has no solution – see also underdetermination.

Logical ambiguity and self-contradiction is analogous to visual ambiguity and impossible objects, such as the Necker cube and impossible cube, or many of the drawings of M. C. Escher.

Read more about this topic:  Ambiguity

Famous quotes containing the words mathematical and/or ambiguity:

    An accurate charting of the American woman’s progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time—but like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal. . . . Each time, the spiral turns her back just short of the finish line.
    Susan Faludi (20th century)

    Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women—the quality of shifting from child to woman, the seeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, “What does a woman want?”
    Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)