Sunday, October 2, 2016

Mathematics... Powerful Medicine



This morning's 'Sunday reflection' comes from Morris Kline (in "Mathematics and the Search For Knowledge"):
"Mathematicians had given up God; so it behooved them to accept man, and this is what they have done. They have continued the development of mathematics and the search for laws of nature, knowing that what they produced was not the design of God but the work of man. Their past successes helped them to retain confidence in what they were doing, and fortunately, hosts of new successes greeted their efforts. What has preserved the life of mathematics was the powerful medicine humans had themselves concocted -- the enormous achievements in celestial mechanics, acoustics, hydrodynamics, optics, electromagnetic theory, and engineering, and the incredible accuracy of its predictions. Thus, mathematical creation and application to science have continued at an even faster pace."



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