Sublime

I cannot remember ever having wanted to be anything but a mathematician. I suppose that it was always clear that my specific abilities lay that way, and it never occurred to me to question the verdict of my elders. I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of a mathematici

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Fisher’s fundamental theorem states—in terms appropriate to the present context—that the better adapted a system is to a particular environment, the less adaptable it is to new environments. By stretching our imagination a bit, we can see how this might apply to computer programs as well as to snails, fruit flies, and tortoises.”21 In other words,

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There are two things at any rate which seem essential, a certain generality and a certain depth; but neither quality is easy to define at all precisely. A significant mathematical idea, a serious mathematical theorem, should be ‘general’ in some such sense as this. The idea should be one which is a constituent in many mathematical constructs, which

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