Bowerbird wrote:

carlo said:

...

   No mathematician can doubt that a straight line is a curve.

of course, if you're talking about a curve that _is_ a straight line, and you want to be absolutely clear, you won't _call_ it a curve, you'll call it a straight line, because that is much less ambiguous. (perhaps even infinitely less ambiguous.)

and that is true whether you are a mathematician or not...

-bowerbird

p.s.  and if you asked for "a number of cookies", and i gave you _zero_, would you be inclined to think i had granted your plea?

And a "straight" line depends upon how the line is graphed. If plotted on a log-log scale, and it is "straight", the function is definitely NOT linear: y=ax+b. This whole discussion of "curved" versus "straight" borders on the "Monty Pythonesque", since it is really a semantic issue -- the meaning of words as used in different contexts and disciplines. Jon Noring