“In the middle of the twentieth century it was attempted to divide physics and mathematics. The consequences turned out to be catastrophic.”

—  Vladimir I. Arnold

"On teaching mathematics", as translated by A. V. Goryunov, in Russian Mathematical Surveys Vol. 53, no. 1 (1998), p. 229–236.
Context: In the middle of the twentieth century it was attempted to divide physics and mathematics. The consequences turned out to be catastrophic. Whole generations of mathematicians grew up without knowing half of their science and, of course, in total ignorance of any other sciences. They first began teaching their ugly scholastic pseudo-mathematics to their students, then to schoolchildren (forgetting Hardy's warning that ugly mathematics has no permanent place under the Sun).

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "In the middle of the twentieth century it was attempted to divide physics and mathematics. The consequences turned out …" by Vladimir I. Arnold?
Vladimir I. Arnold photo
Vladimir I. Arnold8
Russian mathematician 1937–2010

Related quotes

Anzia Yezierska photo

“The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.”

Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970) American writer

The Fat of the Land, from Hungry Hearts and Other Stories (1920)

“Pevsner's career is a prism through which to view the world of art history as it developed in England in the middle of the twentieth century.”

Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) German-born British scholar

Susie Harries, "Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life" (2011), page ix
About

John Moffat photo

“Einstein entertained counterintuitive notions that allowed him to pull physics from the mechanistic, clockwork universe of the eighteenth century up into the twentieth century.”

John Moffat book Reinventing Gravity

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 2, Einstein, p. 25

R. G. Collingwood photo

“The chief business of seventeenth-century philosophy was to reckon with seventeenth-century science… the chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

R. G. Collingwood (1937), as cited in: Patrick Suppes (1973), Logic, methodology and philosophy of science: Proceedings.

Yuri I. Manin photo

“The twentieth century return to Middle Age scholastics taught us a lot about formalisms. Probably it is time to look outside again. Meaning is what really matters.”

Yuri I. Manin (1937) Russian mathematician

in an edition by [Felix E. Browder, Mathematical developments arising from Hilbert problems, Volume 28, Part 1, American Mathematical Society Bookstore, 1976, 0821814281, 36]

James Jeans photo

“With the coming of the twentieth century, there came into being a new physics which was especially concerned with phenomenon on the atomic and sub-atomic scale. …A preliminary glance over the vast territory of this new physics reveals three outstanding landmarks.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

“Throughout the nineteenth century, apart from the division in theoretical sciences and arts, classifiers attempted to divide the sciences into two groups. Already they had before them the examples of Francis Bacon (speculative and descriptive) and Hobbes (quantitative and qualitative). For Coleridge, the sciences were either pure (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Metaphysics) or mixed. Arthur Schopenhauer’s similar groups were called pure and empirical, Wilhelm Wundt in 1887 called them formal and empirical, Globot mathematical and theoretical, and the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences (1904) normative and physical.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Karl Pearson made similar division of the sciences into abstract and concrete
Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Other Chapters, p. 154.

“In its distinctive strategy and internal dynamics and its rich intellectual tradition, Hizb al-Tahrir points up the heterogeneity of twentieth-century Islamist protest movements in the Middle East.”

Suha Taji-Farouki (1950) British Islamic scholar

A Fundamental Quest – Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Search for the Islamic Caliphate, Grey Seal, London 1996

Joe Haldeman photo

“Men started to geoform the earth in the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, a lot of the early work was done by people who failed to see the earth as a closed set of mutually interrelated systems.”

Joe Haldeman book Mindbridge

Source: Mindbridge (1976), Chapter 8 “Geoformy 1” (p. 33)

Gertrude Stein photo

“The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

Related topics