Musings/Träumereien/Devaneios

“It is a well-known anecdote that Hilbert supported her [Emmy Noether] application by declaring at the faculty meeting, ‘I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as Privatdozent. After all, we are a university and not a bathing establishment.´”

 

In the memorial address “Emmy Noether (1935)” delivered in Goodheart Hall, Bryn Mawr College, 26 April 1935, and included in “Levels of Infinity - Selected Writings on Mathematics and Philosophy” by Hermann Weyl, Peter Pesic

Mathematics is, in a sense, profoundly anarchistic - you can't use authority to change or control its progress, and nothing is ruled in our out without proof agreed by the collective of practitioners, and Weyl was one of our most distinguished practitioners of the art of doing beautiful mathematics and physics. Sometimes practitioners have a brave and frankly generous stab at letting the layman get a feel for some of the broader concepts, but ultimately this is an intellectual edifice that's been built by thousands of people over the last five centuries or so and there's no reason whatsoever that we should be able to understand it at all without putting in the hard yards - the problem is not with math, it's with us and our arrogance in assuming that's possible. Weyl, as this homage book testifies, was able to put math into language people could understand and it's absolutely essential for a general audience. Language needs to be a vehicle of understanding and not an obstacle to it.

If you're into Math and Physics, read on.