Abstract
When I was a kid I didn’t want to be a mathematician at all. My dream was to become a spy. This dream was fueled by my mother who had been in the foreign office before she’d had children. But becoming a mother was apparently incompatible with being a diplomat and so she had to leave her job. But she told me and my sister that they had at least allowed her to keep the black gun every member of the foreign office was required to carry as a member of the diplomatic service. I became convinced that my mother must in fact have been a spy and that she might be recalled to active duty at any moment.
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References
G.H. Hardy: A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1940)
F. Land: The Language of Mathematics (John Murray, London 1960)
M. du Sautoy: Finding Moonshine: a mathematician’s journey through symmetry (Fourth Estate, London 2008)
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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Italia
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du Sautoy, M. (2009). Symmetry: A Bridge Between the Two Cultures. In: Carafoli, E., Danieli, G.A., Longo, G.O. (eds) The Two Cultures: Shared Problems. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-0869-4_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-0869-4_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Milano
Print ISBN: 978-88-470-0868-7
Online ISBN: 978-88-470-0869-4
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