Re: A well kept secret

[Zinovy Diskin <zdiskin@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Paul Taylor <pt09@paultaylor.eu> wrote:

> The fact is that category theory alienated the rest of the mathematical
> world.   Since the damage had been done in the 1970s, well before my
> time,
> I have never managed to work out how this happenned, or who was
> responsible.
>

Had it been really  *done*?  It may be just in "the nature of things"
when a community A provides abstract models for community B. Something
similar appears in relations between physicists and mathematicians, or
between physicists/computer scientists and engineers.

When a mathematician is building a math model for some physical
theory, his main driving force is a question "What do they *really*
do?"  As the work is progressing, the question develops into a thesis
"they don't actually understand what they do", and with this attitude,
the mathematician finally brings something structurally neat to
physicists. In a typical good case, the reaction would be like Manin
recently formulated in his interview "we always knew that but thank
you for attention". In a bad case, ... you know.

Isn't it similar to the math vs.category theory case?  For some people
structural clarity and elegance is a matter of life and death, for
others it's a dispensable luxury (it's a rephrasing of Edsger Dijkstra
if I remember right).

zd






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