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Hardy and Littlewood: a Study in Collaboration

G.H. Hardy J.E. Littlewood

Towards Foundational Pluralism...

Hardy `asked `What's your father doing these days. How about that esthetic measure of his?' I replied that my father's book was out. He said, `Good, now he can get back to real mathematics'.
Garret Birkhoff

The Mathematical Community

A man is necessarily talking error unless his words can claim membership in a collective body of thought.
Kenneth Burke

The Language of the Community

The Purposes of the Community

The Methods of the Community

The Meeting Places of the Community

From Scribal Culture to Typographic Culture

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The difference between the man of print and the man of scribal culture is nearly as great as between the non-literate and the literate. The components of Gutenberg technology were not new. But when brought together in the fifteenth century there was an acceleration of social and personal action tantamount to ``take off'' in the sense that W.W. Rostow develops this concept in The Stages of Economic Growth ``that decisive interval in the history of a society in which growth becomes its normal condition.''
Marshall McLuhan

From Typographic Culture to Electronic Culture

Today, with the arrival of automation, the ultimate extension of the electro-magnetic form to the organization of production, we are trying to cope with such new organic production as if it were mechanical mass production.
Marshall McLuhan

Implications and a Proposal

Mathematics books and journals do not look as beautiful as they used to. It is not that their mathematical content is unsatisfactory, rather that the old and well-developed traditions of type-setting have become too expensive. Fortunately, it now appears that mathematics itself can be used to solve this problem.
Donald Knuth

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Sequel...

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Conclusion

Men despise religion; they hate it, and they fear it is true.
Pascal, from Pensées, 1670.

I fear we shall remain for along time in our present confusion and indigence through our own fault. I even fear that after uselessly exhausting curiosity without obtaining from our investigations any considerable gain for our happiness, people may be disgusted with the sciences, and that a fatal despair may cause them to fall back into barbarism. To which result that horrible mass of books that keeps on growing might contribute very much. For in the end, the disorder will become nearly insurmountable; the indefinite multitude of authors will shortly expose them all to the danger of general oblivion; the hope of glory aninimating many people at work in studies will suddenly cease; it will perhaps be as disgraceful to be an author as it was formerly honourable.
Leibnitz, 1680