[FRIAM] coding versus music

[jon zingale]

FWIW, my position is probably best summarized in an interview with Yuri
Manin, where he states:

"I have once translated a talk by Donald Knuth into Russian. In
Uzbekistan, there was a meeting dedicated to Al'khorezmi. Knuth started
his talk with a funny statement. In his opinion, the primary importance
of computers for the mathematical community is that those people finally
took to mathematics who were interested in mathematics but had an
algorithmic sort of mind. Now they were able to do what they wanted.
Before that, this subculture didn't exist. And Knuth was describing
himself as a person whose mind is specially designed for writing software
and how happy he was that, finally, he could do what he wanted to. I take
this argument quite seriously and I do believe that among the community
of future potential mathematicians there is a sub-community whose minds
are better for writing computer programs than for proving theorems. In
the last century, they probably would have proved theorems but nowadays
they do not. I have a great suspicion that for example Euler today would
spend much more of his time writing software because he spent so much of
his time, e.g., in efforts of calculating tables of moon positions. And
I believe that Gauss as well would spend much more time sitting in front
of the screen."

http://www.ega-math.narod.ru/Math/Manin.htm



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