/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11283427
Shafarevich in his article "On certain tendencies in the development of mathematics" states:
>Viewed superficially, mathematics is the result of centuries of effort by many thousands of largely unconnected individuals scattered across continents, centuries and millennia. However, the internal logic of its development much more resembles the work of a single intellect developing its thought in a continuous and systematic way, and only using as a means a multiplicity of human individualities, much as in an orchestra playing a symphony written by some composer the theme moves from one instrument to another so that as soon as one performer is forced to cut short his part, it is taken up by another player, who continues it with due attention to the score.
>Truly, this is not a figure of speech! The history of mathematics is full of examples in which the discovery of one scholar remained unknown only to be reproduced later with amazing accuracy by another. In a letter written the night before the duel which led to his death, Galois formulated some fundamental assertions about the integrals of algebraic functions. More than twenty years later, Riemann, who certainly did not know of Galois' letter, posed a new and proved those very same assertions. To give another example: After Lobachevsky and Bolyai independently founded noneuclidean geometry, it came to light that Gauss and Schweikart had independently arrived at the same results more than ten years earlier. One experience a strange feeling when one sees the same diagrams, drawn as if by the same hand, in the writings of four mathematicians working independently of one another.
>One is drawn to the conclusion that such striking and mystifying human activity, spanning several millenia, far from being an accident, must have a purpose.
Take from that what you will.