I have read that Dirac had no empathy, not even for his family. I think the story goes the same for many other famous mathematicians/scientists. Why is it being so promoted that being a good mathematician and a good human being is impossible? Is it really true? -Mehrnoosh On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 5:23 AM, Robert Seely <rags@math.mcgill.ca> wrote:
Well, we might not say that, but Voevodsky did. Link on the triples page: http://www.math.mcgill.ca/triples/ (or directly http://claymath.msri.org/voevodsky2002.mov) where he says "Categories: one of the most important ideas of 20th century mathematics".
BTW - the Farmelo book, The Strangest Man, is one I recommend to my students - it's well worth looking at. But one thing that struck me was how *little* Farmelo plays the "strange man" theme - Dirac was indeed strange, but that's not what makes him worth reading about, nor was it what made him a great theoretician. Farmelo doesn't (IMO) make the same mistake so many documentary producers do ...
-= rags =-
On Mon, 7 Dec 2009, Joyal, André wrote:
Category theory is a powerful mathematical language.
It is extremely good for organising, unifying and suggesting new directions of research. It is probably the most important mathematical developpement of the 20th century.
But we cant say that publically.
André Joyal
-- Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow Oxford University Computing Laboratory Research Fellow of Wolfson College http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/people/Mehrnoosh.Sadrzadeh/ [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]