Automation and Early Computation, Social Inequaltiy

Haldane did not foresee the computer, the most potent agent of social change during the last fifty years. He expected his Daedalus, destroyer of gods and of men, to be a biologist. Instead, the Daedalus of this century turned out to be John von Neumann, the mathematician who consciously pushed mankind into the era of computers. Von Neumann knew well what he was doing. Soon after the end of the second world war, he started the Princeton computer project. Like Haldane's Daedalus, he had dreams ...

 Mathematicians Who Can Only Generalize or Specialize

A mathematician who can only generalise is like a monkey who can only climb UP a tree. ... And a mathematician who can only specialise is like a monkey who can only climb DOWN a tree. In fact neither the up monkey nor the down monkey is a viable creature. A real monkey must find food and escape his enemies and so must be able to incessantly climb up and down. A real mathematician must be able to generalise and specialise. ... There is, I think, a moral for the teacher. A teacher of traditiona...

 Mathematics is the Science of Self-Evident Things

These estimates may well be enhanced by one from F. Klein (1849-1925), the leading German mathematician of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 'Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.' ... If mathematics is indeed the science of self-evident things, mathematicians are a phenomenally stupid lot to waste the tons of good paper they do in proving the fact. Mathematics is abstract and it is hard, and any assertion that it is simple is true only in a sev...