Timeline for What's a mathematician to do?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 9, 2020 at 9:32 | comment | added | cangrejo | @PeteL.Clark Or perhaps he was humble and candid enough to admit that a reputation in present and future folklore is not necessarily of any significance, and felt compelled to seek a characterization of his work he could be at ease with. | |
| Oct 28, 2012 at 3:17 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | I saw that Rebecca Goldstein interview; the information she gives on Hardy is incorrect in several places. Link: edge.org/3rd_culture/goldstein05/goldstein05_index.html She says Hardy was in his fifties when he wrote AMA, but the essay came out in 1940; he was born in 1877. "He wrote the book after his first suicide attempt and before his second—and successful—suicide attempt." No, his suicide attempt was in summer 1947, and his death in December 1947 wasn't a suicide AFAICT (indeed, Snow wrote that Hardy said he would not try again, that he was prepared to wait it out). | |
| Oct 30, 2010 at 8:39 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | @Charles and Yemon: it was just a comment, and I am not a historian or a psychologist. Please add "I think" at the beginning of it. But here is what Rebecca Goldstein said in an interview available online: "He wrote the book after his first suicide attempt and before his second—and successful—suicide attempt." I also find, as I said more lightly above, an extreme under-estimate of his own worth and abilities. Maybe there are also other reasons for that, as Charles suggests. Anyway, to be sure, I can't "diagnose" anyone of anything; I can only state my opinion. | |
| Oct 27, 2010 at 20:40 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | Is there any source for this diagnosis of depression other than C. P. Snow's foreword to AMA? | |
| Oct 27, 2010 at 11:22 | comment | added | Charles Matthews | Not really happy with that comment. The merciless quality of the writing there traces back to the Bloomsbury group (Hardy was on the edge of that clique). While we know he did suffer depression, it is a disabling condition by the time doctors should be involved, and not then one that allows for producing literary classics | |
| Oct 27, 2010 at 7:44 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | Hardy was pretty clearly clinically depressed when he wrote that book. From a purely objective standpoint, it would have been much more reasonable for him to have written something like "I was arguably the best analytic number theorist, and the greatest British mathematician, of the first half of the twentieth century, and my reputation will be steadily on the rise more than 50 years after my death. That's pretty good, right?" | |
| Oct 27, 2010 at 4:21 | history | answered | Bob Pego | CC BY-SA 2.5 |