Is the apology for posting something that should have been HTML as a PDF?
A Mathematician's Apology (1940) [pdf]
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: A Mathematician's Apology (1940) [pdf]
#12The greatness of Hardy is that some unknown person from across the world (Ramanujan) wrote him barely legible letters, and he read them, believed in the writer, and helped expose him to the world.
I was once in a position where lots of people wrote me letters seeking to tell me about their talents. All the letters went unread to my dustbin. True and sad.
Re: A Mathematician's Apology (1940) [pdf]
#13The greatness of Hardy is that some unknown person from across the world (Ramanujan) wrote him barely legible letters, and he read them, believed in the writer, and helped expose him to the world. I was once in a position where lots of people wrote me letters seeking to tell me about their talents. All the letters went unread to my dustbin. True and sad.
[deleted]
Re: A Mathematician's Apology (1940) [pdf]
#14He's incredibly ageist and cynical about man's abilities to do great things. Definitely a curmudgeon, but mixed in with some good quotes and advice. I particularly thought this was cute: "It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking ‘Is what I do worth while?’ and ‘Am I the…
I like Hardy, but I dislike his ageism here too.
Erdős is a good counterexample to his argument. Even Euler. Many famous mathematicians have produced good work late in their lives.
Re: A Mathematician's Apology (1940) [pdf]
#15He's incredibly ageist and cynical about man's abilities to do great things. Definitely a curmudgeon, but mixed in with some good quotes and advice. I particularly thought this was cute: "It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking ‘Is what I do worth while?’ and ‘Am I the…
I like Hardy, but I dislike his ageism here too. Erdős is a good counterexample to his argument. Even Euler. Many famous mathematicians have produced good work late in their lives.
Erdos isn't a counter-example to anything. I mean I agree with you. Old people can do math. Look at Yitang Zheng. But Erdos is the exception to every rule ever.
Re: A Mathematician's Apology (1940) [pdf]
#16He's incredibly ageist and cynical about man's abilities to do great things. Definitely a curmudgeon, but mixed in with some good quotes and advice. I particularly thought this was cute: "It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking ‘Is what I do worth while?’ and ‘Am I the…
Some context for his ageism: He was 63 when the Apology was written, and feeling very much past his prime and no longer able to do genuinely creative work in mathematics. The ageism is directed mostly at himself.
Re: A Mathematician's Apology (1940) [pdf]
#17Despite saying, "I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world." He contributed a lot of practical findings in math. The Hardy-Weinberg principle[0] comes to mind... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_princip...
It's almost frightening to me that the Hardy of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium could be writing this. It's part of a healthy understanding of genetics at all!
I very much doubt that Hardy regarded that as a "discovery". From a pure-mathematical point of view it's completely trivial.
(I do not say that to diminish its importance, which is an entirely separate matter. And something can be mathematically trivial but still an important discovery -- the cleverness may e.g. reside in noticing that it's a thing that might be true at all. Be all that as it may, I can't imagine Hardy, given his general dismissive attitude to applications of mathematics, seeing it as a discovery rather than a triviality that happened to be useful to biologists.)
Re: A Mathematician's Apology (1940) [pdf]
#18I did not care much for Hardys opinion about how innocent pure math was. Since it was later proved wrong by nukes. But the novella was a real glimpse into the austere life of a curmudgeon and some of the oxford culture. In addition to the culture of the elite as well, which unsurprisingly respect science and math much more than proles.
Well, it's not math that kills, it's people... I mean, I don't think it is fair to blame scientists, engineers, workers, etc. - let alone the tools that they use - for the way the product of their work is used. Also, to be fair, the elementary analysis book which Hardy wrote under the title A Course of Pure Mathematics by today's standards would hardly qualify as a book on 'pure math' anyway.
>I mean, I don't think it is fair to blame scientists, engineers, workers, etc. - let alone the tools that they use
I think it should be fair. It's no secret what these precision guided bombs are being used for, so why should the nerds that continue to work on them be free of culpability?
Re: A Mathematician's Apology (1940) [pdf]
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like Hardy, but I dislike his ageism here too. Erdős is a good counterexample to his argument. Even Euler. Many famous mathematicians have produced good work late in their lives.
Erdos isn't a counter-example to anything. I mean I agree with you. Old people can do math. Look at Yitang Zheng. But Erdos is the exception to every rule ever.
Doesn't that make him the counter example to everything :)
Re: A Mathematician's Apology (1940) [pdf]
#20Is the apology for posting something that should have been HTML as a PDF?
Why Hypertext Markup Language rather than Portable Document Format? Because you like ads?