It was a legitimate question. If one scientist announces that a thing is probably true, and another demonstrates it with rigor, which one has done more to advance science? Is the making of a conjecture an act of discovery? Or is it just a cold-blooded staking of a claim? Mathematicians have always faced such issues, but the debate became more intense as computers began to play their new role. Those who used computers to conduct experiments became more like laboratory scientists, playing by rules that allowed discovery without the usual theorem-proof, theorem-proof of the standard mathematics
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