There was a wonderful article in the Wall Street Journal today about mathematics in the former Soviet Union. It is worth reading for anyone interested in finding out a little about the inner beauty of math.
Here’s a short except:
what mathematics really is: “It was a wonderful education… Gelfand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry.”
In the mathematical counterculture, math “was almost a hobby,” recalls Sergei Gelfand. “So you could spend your time doing things that would not be useful to anyone for the nearest decade.” Mathematicians called it “math for math’s sake.”
How cool would that be? Can you imagine something like that in an American school? I can’t.
So check out Mathematics in the Soviet Union, at the Wall Street Journal’s website.
Tags:
