>"A Mathematician's Apology" is the bitter rant of a man who only valued one thing in his life and had largely lost the ability to do it in his old age.
It's been a while since I've read it, but isn't it mostly a theory on what makes something beautiful and worth doing? It's always struck me as being probably one of the most important essays of all time.
I find it interesting that what Aaron and you took from the essay has essentially zero overlap with my take.
I thought AMA was incredibly sad. Both for what he thought was important, what he didn't, and how that changed. As a huge baseball fan, I also loved that the one constant were the daily scores.
"Mostly a theory...": I agree it's that too.
Re:A Non-Programmer’s Apology
by mathgladiator on Saturday March 05, 2011 @12:27PM
(#2291832)
I think there is cause to read it and reflect on your life and say "hey, I should value more than one thing in life".
I think devoting your life to one thing is the temptation of a life in academia, but it also is a path to bitterness.
Hardy wrote of Srinivasa Ramanujan's untimely death that it was "not a great tragedy" that he died at the age of thirty-two, as he was already too old to do serious mathematics.
"A Mathematician's Apology" is the bitter rant of a man who only valued one thing in his life and had largely lost the ability to do it in his old age. If I had read it and believed it ten years ago, I never would have gone for my Ph.D. in mathematics.