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Aesthetics for the Working Mathematician

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Part of the book series: CMS Books in Mathematics ((CMSBM))

Abstract

If my teachers had begun by telling me that mathematics was pure play with presuppositions, and wholly in the air, I might have become a good mathematician, because I am happy enough in the realm of essence. But they were over-worked drudges, and I was largely inattentive, and inclined lazily to attribute to incapacity in myself or to a literary temperament that dullness which perhaps was due simply to lack of initiation. (Santayana, 1944, p. 238)

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Notes

  1. In Brouwer’s Cambridge Lectures on Intuitionism, the editor van Dalen (1981, p. 95) comments in a footnote

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© 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Borwein, J.M. (2006). Aesthetics for the Working Mathematician. In: Sinclair, N., Pimm, D., Higginson, W. (eds) Mathematics and the Aesthetic. CMS Books in Mathematics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-38145-9_2

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