Discussion Main / MathematiciansAnswer

The "[one] or [other]" "Yes." thing is a Mathematician's Answer, since it's an answer that is useless but technically answers the question as it was asked. It doesn't matter if it's ambiguous or not.

And yes, it is useless, because it doesn't necessarily mean [one] specifically, [other] specifically, or both, just that the entire clause "[one] or [other]" is correct.

There's a difference between the mathematician's answer to "A or B", which is giving an OR answer to an XOR question, and the yes-to-all answer, which is giving an AND answer to an XOR question.

The latter is still a useful response, as it implies that all of the choices given in the question are true, if each in their own different way. So it's not really a mathematician's answer, which by definition is correct, but useless in that it doesn't answer the 'implied' question.

"A or B?" "Yes." requires context to determine whether it's a mathematician's answer or not, which most other examples don't require.

Sort of. Technically, if you take "are you going to..." as a native English speaker would, then yeah. But given the page's context, "I am going to..." would imply there's no set time frame—"will you...?" generally comes with a time frame by implication, usually within a few seconds or minutes. "I am going to..." on this particular page might carry an "I will perform this action at some point in time most likely prior to my death" implication.

My two cents, both should just be called polite order forms, but there's not a great way to communicate that fact that doesn't rely on knowledge of grammar vocabulary. The original writer was probably working a way around that.

"Will you..." has an archaic meaning "do you wish/intend to..." (see Shakespeare for examples). The strict sense of referring to a future event is "shall you...", which Shakespeare would have understood and which we now consider slightly pretentious.

Apparently the word is "Mathemetician's Answer," or at least that's what I got from the exchange.

I disagree. In general, the question "A or B?" can correctly be answered with "Yes" if only A is true; if only B is true; or if A and B are both true. Answering "A or B" with "Yes" when both A and B are true is still a Mathematician's Answer, because it doesn't clarify to the person who asked whether A only, B only, or both A and B are true.

"Would you like coffee or tea?" "Yes." is a valid example of Mathematician's Answer if the person wanted coffee, or if he wanted tea, or if he wanted coffee and tea.

I agree with Devil's Advocate; the specific cases result from the lack of differentiation between OR and XOR in English, which is mentioned. In fact, the Babylon 5 example is a perfect example in that the answer is a correct answer to the question-as-asked (allowing for inclusive OR) but NOT as intended (since speakers usually mean XOR, and will say "and/or" to specify OR). On a related note, the section that acknowledges this in the article seems to imply that differentiation between OR and XOR in some languages resolves the mathematician's answer of "yes," which it does not in fact do as long as one and only one of the items is correct in an XOR question or one, the other, or both of the answers is correct in an OR question. For example, the coffee/tea question is INTENDED to be "Would you like coffee or tea, and if so which would you like?" I do think the OR/XOR differentiation is interesting and occasionally relevant to the trope, so I don't think the line should be scrapped, but it does need to be re-worded.