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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/16/2014 12:18 PM, Nassif
Ghoussoub wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:FB3C4C2B-B337-42ED-897B-5137FD52E7C8@math.ubc.ca"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">"I am prepared for lawyers and business people to say they hated math and not to remember any math beyond arithmetic, but this!? "
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendieck.html?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=t.co">http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendieck.html?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=t.co</a></pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
"All such people are expected to learn a hell of a lot of math."
That, perhaps, misses the point. It's not surprising or shocking
that physicists and chemists don't know all the mathematics in the
article - I will admit to not knowing it all myself. What is
shocking is that an editor who has, presumably, no compunction about
exposing the tender minds of astronomers to obscure organometallic
radicals, or mentioning rare wildflowers (by their Linnaean
binomials, no less) in the presence of geologists, should feel that
these scholars <i>should not</i><i> read </i>about mathematics
that they do not know.<br>
<br>
Mathematics is a large enough subject that we are all ignorant of
some of it. This seems more like being terrified of it.<br>
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