[FRIAM] coding versus music

[Roger Frye]

I agree wholeheartedly. The one computer course I got to take in my senior
year while majoring in electrical engineering and physics saved me from
electrocuting or irradiating myself in a lab. Computer math made such sense
to me that I could enjoy doing the assignments instead of fumbling through
vague theories and integrals.

On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 10:41 AM jon zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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