A year after publishing The Number Devil, the poet, essayist, novelist, editor and translator Hans Magnus Enzensberger presented a short essay at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin (1998) entitled Drawbridge Up: Mathematics – A Cultural Anathema. The essay, which ended up being included in his book The Elixirs of Science, denounces mathematics as a foreign territory of culture, defends both its usefulness and elegance (it has aesthetic value) and demands greater presence and recognition for it. And there is a prodigious sentence full of force in that essay that perfectly sums up Enzensberger’s position -and resembles, as one drop of water to another, the philosophy of this blog-:
Excluding mathematics from the sphere of culture is a kind of emasculation that seems to bother no one.
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