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Human mathematicians could become “priests to oracles.”

This is a decidedly anti-enlightenment statement.



Okay ..

However given the history of mathematics that's not really out of order. There's a lot of mysticism intertwined with early mathematics and it's only relatively recently that mathematics has taken the beads out of her hair, put on a business suit, and gotten to work.

I mean even Galileo's, the patron saint of skepticism, job was observing the stars so that he could write horoscopes.

And we see the attitude repeated even today. I work in a technical field and whenever I mention that I think type theory is kind of cool the response more often then not is for them to give me the ol' "Thank goodness for people like you, I'm just not a math person."




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