Phillip Griffiths is a mathematician with a most brilliant career. He has been a professor at the universities of Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard and Duke, and was director of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1991 to 2003, and winner of such prestigious awards as the Wolf Prize (2008) and the Chern Medal (2014). He also worked for the World Bank in an NGO that promotes science in developing countries. In 2000, in an interview with journalist Mónica Salomone for El País, he predicted that the new century would be a golden age for mathematics, especially for its ability to deal with uncertainty, and its growing success in fields such as medicine, biology and the social sciences (you can read the interview here). In the interview, Griffiths carefully nuanced what mathematics could and could not do in these fields. For example, after Griffiths said: “You can’t model the behaviour of a person, but you can model the behaviour of a population”, the journalist questioned: “You predict…”, to which Griffiths replied: “No, we don’t predict. We just say that if people behave in the future as they have in the past, then interest rates will do this or that. But people are unpredictable, fortunately”. He added:
Human behaviour is not reducible to mathematics.
Nevertheless, Griffiths did venture a prediction about the behaviour of mathematicians: “Will mathematicians end up getting rich from their models?” asked the journalist. And Griffiths replied: “Oh, we don’t have the right temperament… We leave that to the economists”.
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