Post date: Apr 16, 2014 1:59:42 PM
Steven Shreve (CMU), in his presidential address to the 5th World Conference of the Bachelier Finance Society (2008) noted that mathematics had a tradition of throwing out its children, highlighting how computer science was once mathematical but is no longer. This observation prompted my interest in the relationship between mathematics and finance; objectively I think it is difficult to cleave the two disciplines, but I suspect that "mathematicians" will push "financial mathematicians" out of the nest, but who is the cuckoo?
I believe that many of the issues of how mathematics is perceived is self inflicted: we object to the image of being other-worldly but we cultivate the image. We bemoan the lack of mathematical ability in government, but we celebrate the lack of political ability in mathematicians. There is an aphorism that I have heard from a politician "We will take science seriously when science takes politics seriously".
I am interested in how, historically, mathematicians have been overtly political and how their political activities have influenced their mathematics. One paper that relates to the British experience is David Forfar's (published) paper on where those successful in Cambridge's Mathematical Tripos exam ended up, highlighting how those who had proved good at mathematics ended up in diverse careers. Interestingly, G. H. Hardy hated the Tripos, believing it ossified British mathematics; one wonders where this places him in the "long division" debate.
I think there is a problem with mathematics that is similar to the problem that affects UK-US relations. Because the British and Americans speak the same language we think we mean the same things, when in fact we don't. When an academic talks of mathematics I think they mean something different to what a lay person understands and even a mathematics graduate working outside academia conceives is mathematics. I believe Madeleine linked to this when she made a point about "low level maths for high level problem" v. "high level maths for low level problems".