Abstract
1. Proust, with regard to the latest works of the musician Vinteuil, speaks about a “transposition in the sonorous order of depth” (La Prisonnière, Pléiade II, p. 257). There is certainly a transposition of depth in the mathematical order, since mathematicians are apparently in agreement to qualify a result or a problem as “profound”. It is the sense of this expression which we would like to elucidate.
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Notes
Number Theory, an Approach through History from Hammourapi to Legendre, Birkhäuser, 1983.
For this concept, we will refer the reader to our Essai d’une philosophic du style, 2 édition Odile Jacob, 1988.
See, for example, D. E. Rowe & J. McLeary, The History of Modern Mathematics, I, p. 431 ff, 1989. We should also mention the works of Artin, F. K. Schmidt, Hasse, and A. Weil on the function z attached to curves on a finite field, where algebraic geometry meets number theory.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Granger, G.G. (1997). What is a Profound Result in Mathematics?. In: Agazzi, E., Darvas, G. (eds) Philosophy of Mathematics Today. Episteme, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5690-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5690-5_5
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