[In the mathematics degree course at Cambridge, Turing was] one of those
who could feel themselves entering another country, in which social
rank, money, and politics were insignificant, and in which the greatest
figures, Gauss and Newton, had both been born farm boys.
Andrew Hodges,
Alan Turing: The Enigma, Centenary Ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012), p. 60
Alan responded with joy to the absolute quality of mathematics, its
apparent independence of human affairs, which G.H. Hardy expressed
another way: 317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our
minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so,
because mathematical reality is built that way.
Id. (citing G.H. Hardy,
A Mathematician's Apology (Cambridge University Press, 1940))
No comments:
Post a Comment