ah, linguistic problems not sure about British/Canadian English but in American cranks ae slightly worse than crackpots and not at all the same as being cranky Jim Stasheff jds@math.upenn.edu Home page: www.math.unc.edu/Faculty/jds On Wed, 19 Apr 2006, Marta Bunge wrote:
Dear Vaughan,
On the concern you raised a while back about perceptions of crankiness, physics runs the gamut from well-publicized spectacular advances to more cranks than just about any other scientific discipline; in that respect it nicely brackets both CT and chemistry on both sides. Whether CT has accumulated more cranks than chemists is an interesting question, which brings to mind the category theory professors from the Mahareshi Yogi's TM university in Fairfield buttonholing Bill Lawvere at an AMAST meeting in Iowa a while back. Wish I could have video'd that.
The thread I unintentionally initiated (with mixed results) did not express any concern about cranks, but about crackpots, whom I view as dangerous only if not spotted in time.
I think that "cranks" means "eccentric" and, in it itself, it means nothing to me -- crankiness (if that is the correct adjective) can be: (a) the result of genuine absent-mindedness and total commitment to their activities as mathematicians/scientists, or (b) it can also be a pose by an insecure person who may have nothing else but his crankiness to be distinguished from the others. Some fields (like Physics) have both. Chemists are too serious (boring) to tolerate any cranks in their midst. CT? Yes, there are a few, but in my view, that is the least of our worries. Maybe by "crank" you meant something else ("crackpots"?), as the incident you recall (first time I hear about it) seems to indicate. In any case, the last thing anybody wants right now is to go back to discuss this sensitive issue.
Best, Marta