Scribd
Upload
141 views1 page

Freeman Missed Opportunity

Uploaded by

Antone Calot

Copyright:

© All Rights Reserved
Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
Download as pdf or txt

Freeman Missed Opportunity

Uploaded by

Antone Calot
141 views1 page

Original Title

freeman missed opportunity

Copyright

© © All Rights Reserved

Available Formats

PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

© All Rights Reserved
Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
Download as pdf or txt
141 views1 page

Freeman Missed Opportunity

Uploaded by

Antone Calot

Copyright:

© All Rights Reserved
Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1/ 1

BULLETIN OF THE

AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY


Volume 78, Number 5, September 1972

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES1
BY FREEMAN J. DYSON

It is important for him who wants to discover not to confine him-


self to one chapter of science, but to keep in touch with various others.
JACQUES HADAMARD

1. Introduction. The purpose of the Gibbs lectures is officially defined


as "to enable the public and the academic community to become aware
of the contribution that mathematics is making to present-day thinking
and to modern civilization." This puts me in a difficult position. I happen
to be a physicist who started life as a mathematician. As a working
physicist, I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between
mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past
centuries, has recently ended in divorce. Discussing this divorce, the
physicist Res Jost remarked the other day, "As usual in such affairs,
one of the two parties has clearly got the worst of it." During the last
twenty years we have seen mathematics rushing ahead in a golden age
of luxuriant growth, while theoretical physics left on its own has become
a little shabby and peevish. So I am forced to give this lecture an emphasis
different from that intended by the founders. Instead of talking about
"the contribution that mathematics is making to present-day thinking"
in my field, I shall talk about the contribution that mathematics ought
to have made but did not. I shall examine in detail some examples of
missed opportunities, occasions on which mathematicians and physicists
lost chances of making discoveries by neglecting to talk to each other.
My purpose in calling attention to such incidents is not to blame the
mathematicians or to excuse the physicists for our failure in the last
twenty years to equal the great achievements of the past. My purpose
is not to lament the past but to mould the future.
It is obviously absurd for me to imagine that I can mould the future
with a one-hour lecture. The fact that Hilbert in 1900 [1] and Minkowski
in 1908 [2] succeeded in doing it does not give me any confidence that
I can do it too. But at least I have learned from Hilbert and Minkowski
that one does not influence people by talking in generalities. Hilbert
and Minkowski gave specific suggestions of things that mathematicians
and physicists could profitably think about I shall try to follow their
1
Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture, given under the auspices of the American Mathematical
Society, January 17, 1972; received by the editors January 17, 1972.
Copyright © American Mathematical Society 1972

635

You might also like