Fun_People Archive
9 Jul
the importance of proving theorems

Date: Fri,  9 Jul 93 23:23:21 PDT
To: Fun_People
Subject: the importance of proving theorems

 From: <research.att.com!pep>
 From: Adam L. Buchsbaum <alb@Princeton.EDU>
 From: --J. ?

     "If I could come back after five hundred years and find
     that the Riemann hypothesis or Fermat's last 'theorem' was
     proved, I would be disappointed, because I would be pretty
     sure, in view of the history of attempts to prove these
     conjectures, that an enormous amount of time had been spent
     on proving theorems that are unimportant to the life of man."

-- Morris Kline, from an interview in _Mathematical People_
   (eds. Donald J. Albers and G. L. Alexanderson, Contemporary, 1985.)

© 1993 Peter Langston