I suppose there's no formally defined procedure that accepts a natural language statement and outputs either its formalization or "misspecified". And "absolutely true" means "the vast majority of mathematicians agree that there's only one formal proposition that corresponds to this statement".

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varjag 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you suppose wrong. A statement like "the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares on the other two sides" doesn't seam out of reach of an algorithmic procedure like a classical NLP.

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red75prime 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, we can write a procedure that recognizes some formal grammar, which intersects with the natural language. Defining the formal grammar that fully captures the current natural language understanding of the mathematical community is a bit harder.

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wizzwizz4 13 hours ago | parent [-]

This problem was even worse: it's matched by the formal grammar, but the naïve formalisation has a trivial answer, so it is clearly not what was intended.

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NetMageSCW 7 hours ago | parent [-]

That clearly may be doing some heavy lifting. It is assumed that trivial answer wasn’t what was intended for the problem, but unless someone asked Erdos, I don’t think we know.

	▲	wizzwizz4 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Considering that he did some work towards the problem, tackling non-trivial cases, I think we do know. There's no way he wouldn't have perceived trivial solutions at some point.