Ars Mathematica

Issue 38 of Plus is now out!

I’ll be on vacation for the next few days, so I leave you to the tender ministrations of my co-bloggers, and this anecdote (from Deirdre McCloskey’s Secret Sins of Economics):

I have a brilliant and learned friend who is an intellectual historian of note. He and I were walking to lunch in Iowa City one day and I said offhandedly, assuming he would of course know this, that mathematics was one of the great achievements of Western culture. He was so astonished by the claim that he stopped short and argued with me there on the sidewalk by the Old Capitol Mall: “Surely math is like plumbing: useful, but hardly in touch with deeper things; hardly a cultural achievement!” I tried to persuade him that he felt this way only because he had no acquaintance with mathematics, but I don’t think I succeeded.

Hermann Weyl once said “In these days the angel of topology and the devil of abstract algebra fight for the soul of every individual discipline of mathematics.” Discuss.