Ben Orlin at Math With Bad Drawings:
As you know, I am a scholar of literature, with no more than a high school background in math. Yet together we shall reach up and touch the thinnest, most delicate branches in the canopy of modern mathematics. Most likely, we will snap them by mistake.
Anyway, we begin as moderns must: by venerating the ancients in a covertly self-serving manner.
In A Mathematician’s Apology, after a long preamble about mathematics as an Edenic garden of harmless beauty, G.H. Hardy finally turns to some actual math:
I will state and prove two of the famous theorems of Greek mathematics… They are ‘simple’ theorems, simple both in idea and in execution, but there is no doubt at all about their being theorems of the highest class. Each is as fresh and significant as when it was discovered—two thousand years have not written a wrinkle on either of them.
No surprise that Hardy calls the proofs “significant.” But why “fresh”?
Why advertise this proof, like a synthetic fabric, as “wrinkle-free”?
More here.
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