Conference rusure::math

904.0. "An Elegant Quote from Bertrand Russell" by HPSTEK::XIA () Thu Jul 21 1988 15:21

     Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme 
     beauty--a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without 
     appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous 
     trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of 
     a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.  The 
     true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more 
     than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to 
     be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.  What is best in 
     mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be 
     assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and 
     again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.  Real life 
     is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise 
     between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason 
     knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the 
     creative activity embodying in the splendid edifices the passionate 
     aspiration after the perfect from which all great work springs.  
     Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of 
     nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, 
     where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, 
     at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile 
     of the actual world.

                                           Bertrand Russell
                                           (1872 - 1970)

	It would be interesting to know whether this quotation dates
	from before or after the advent of Kurt Goedel's little 
	theorem...

    re .1
    I do not know the date of the quotation; however, it is most likely
    dated before the "little theorem".  On the other hand, I do not
    see why "It would be interesting to know wheter this quotation dates
    from before or after the advent of Kurt Godel's little theorem...".
    Eugene