Can math.atan2 return INF?

[Rustom Mody]

On Thursday, June 30, 2016 at 11:33:58 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016 01:28 am, Rustom Mody wrote:
> 
> > On Thursday, June 30, 2016 at 1:55:18 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> > 
> >> you state that Turing "believes in souls" and that he "wishes to
> >> put the soul into the machine" -- what do his religious beliefs have to
> >> do with his work?
> > 
> > Bizarre question -- becomes more patently ridiculous when put into general
> > form "What does what I do have to do with what I believe?"
> 
> Lots of people do things that go against their beliefs, or their beliefs (at
> least, their professed beliefs) go against what they do. But I'll ask
> again: in what way does Turing's supposed beliefs about souls have anything
> to do with his mathematical work?
> 
> Let's be concrete:
> 
> In what way does the Halting Problem depend on the existence (or
> non-existence) of the soul?
> 
> How was his work on breaking German military codes during World War 2
> reliant on these supposed souls? (In the sense of a separate, non-material
> spirit, not in the figurative sense that all people are "souls".)
> 
> 
> > More specifically the implied suggested equation "soul = religious"
> > is your own belief. See  particularly "Christian faith" in the quote
> > below.
> 
> Of course belief in souls is a religious belief. It certainly isn't a
> scientific belief, or a materialistic belief.
> 
> Don't make the mistake of thinking that materialism is a religious belief.
> It is no more a religious belief than "bald" is a hair colour.
> 
> 
<snip>
> 
> What reason do you have for claiming that Kronecker objected to
> non-algebraic numbers? Nothing I have read about him suggests that he was
> more accepting of algebraic reals than non-algebraic reals.
> 
> (I'm not even sure if mathematicians in Kronecker's day distinguished
> between the two.)
> 

Lots of questions... I would guess rhetorical.

However under the assumption that they are genuine (or could be genuine for
others than you), I went back and checked.
I recollected that I started thinking along these lines — viz. that philosophical disputes led to the genesis of computers — after reading an essay
by a certain Adam Siepel... which subsequently seems to have fallen off the net

I tracked him down and re-posted his essay here:
http://blog.languager.org/2016/07/mechanism-romanticism-computers.html

Just to be clear — this is Dr. Adam Siepel's writing reposted with his permission