Abstract
I have been an admirer of Reuben Hersh ever since I received a copy of The Mathematical Experience, then brand new, as a birthday present. At that stage, of course, I was admiring the tandem Reuben formed then, and on other occasions, with his coauthor Philip J. Davis. It was only almost 20 years later, after I started reading What is Mathematics, Really?, that I could focus my admiration on Reuben—and not only on the mathematician, the author, and the thinker about mathematics but on the person Reuben Hersh—the unmistakable and unforgettable voice that accompanies the reader from the beginning to the end of the book. So unforgettable was the voice, in fact, that when Reuben wrote to me out of the blue three years ago to ask me what I thought about a certain French philosopher, I so clearly heard the voice of the narrator of What is Mathematics, Really? (and no doubt of many of the passages of his books with Davis) that I could honestly write back that I felt that I had known him for decades, though we have never met and until that time we had never exchanged a single word.
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- 1.
As I wrote that sentence I remembered that I have still not met Reuben, nor have I ever spoken to him; but I checked one of the videos online in which he appears, and, sure enough, his literal voice is very much as I expected.
- 2.
Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, December 19 and 26, 2016 Issue.
- 3.
Now joined, predictably, by Apple. In all fairness, I should add that on January 27 the Partnership on AI, which had reported no news during the previous three months, has added six independent members to its Board of Trustees, including a representative of the ACLU. I am cautiously optimistic. The outreach to civil society does not invalidate the impressions I took home from last October’s panel.
- 4.
The word “Luddite” had been pronounced earlier, and hung over the discussion, as if to reinforce the sense that the social transformations the panelists were discussing were foreordained; the question I just quoted—I happen to be the one who asked it—was the only one to challenge this claim of inevitability; and many of the original Luddites were also handloom weavers.
- 5.
He seemed to have forgotten that Gandhi’s movement was primarily a reaction to colonialism, a strange oversight for a historian.
- 6.
This is not to suggest that expertise should give way to the populism of a strongman, but rather that it’s incumbent on experts to be less arrogant.
- 7.
For Jane Austen, it was the mathematician who had the “coldest heart and the steadiest brain.” Emma, Volume III, Chapter 3.
- 8.
Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Continuum (1994) pp. 26–7.
- 9.
“The age of humanism is ending,” The Mail and Guardian, December 22, 2016.
- 10.
Nearly 30 years ago, in an article entitled “A Hippocratic Oath for Mathematicians?” (inChristine Keitel, chief editor, Mathematics, Education, and Society, Science and Technology Education, Document series No. 35, UNESCO (1989)), Chandler Davis was already suggesting that the harmlessness of the work of pure mathematicians deserved closer examination. Davis’s article mainly referred to military applications; those considered here mostly concern the civilian sector, though no one can ignore the military implications of “Embodied AI,” for instance.
- 11.
Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 19 February 2016, volume 3, article 3, www.frontiersin.org.
- 12.
in the Financial Modelers’ Manifesto, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Modelers’_Manifesto and the references given there.
- 13.
Weapons of Math Destruction.
- 14.
See http://www.ams.org/notices/201504/rnoti-p400.pdf and the references indicated there.
- 15.
Amaury Lambert, Laurent Mazliak, E la nave va?, Gazette des mathématiciens, 120, avril 2009, pp. 103–5. My loose translation.
- 16.
Nevertheless, see this from Fox News, in 2011: “the talk of the new year is this repealing Obama-care…. The debate should be about the liberals …trying to repeal the laws of math and physics. “http://www.morrisanderson.com/resource-center/entry/Boehner-Offers-Evidence-Obama-care-is-Job-Killer-Spending-Trillion-on-Plan-/.
- 17.
Hersh, Reuben. What is Mathematics, Really?. Cary, US: Oxford University Press (US), 2001. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 4 February 2017, p. 39.
- 18.
Weapons of Math Destruction, New York: Crown (2016) p. 207.
- 19.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press (2014) p. 32. Also, on p.574: “For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of their content.”
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Harris, M. (2017). Do Mathematicians Have Responsibilities?. In: Sriraman, B. (eds) Humanizing Mathematics and its Philosophy. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61231-7_11
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