It was upon Thom’s recommendation, that | spent the year in the

It was upon Thom’s recommendation, that | spent the year in the Mathematics Institute in Warwick, England. Using the Math House #2 s home base, | made many trips to Oxford University and a few to Cambridge. It was in these places that | learned first hand that belief in the Resurrection was not simply a matter of socioeconomic class. | tried to schedule my trips to Oxford or Cambridge to coincide with the weekend so | could hear the remarkably literate sermons at the Universities college chapels. In these places, for hundreds of years, just because one was a top-notch practitioner of mathematics or linguistics did not mean that the Don did not have within him the full panoply of beliefs attendant to the Christian God. Maybe this easy combination of logic and Spirit derives from the character of English mathematics. There are graduates with professorially enfranchising Masters of Art Degrees in Mathematics from Cambridge University where the subject is considered by many to be part of the culture of the humanities, closely akin to philosophy and linguistics.. In the universities of United States, for example the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an academic degree of Ph.D. in mathematics is seen by most faculty as an indication of the intellectual equipment required for a life of scientific work in which disconfirmable experiments are the ultimate criteria for knowledge. The field of pure mathematics (not ostensibly relevant to the real world outside the mind) has itself evolved in this direction. Recently, a physical scientist, a theoretical physicist, Edward Witten, was given the mathematician’s ultimate award, the Field’s Medal. In American universities in general, very few mathematics departments are in schools of the humanities. Most are in the schools of science. This variation in bureaucratic, metaphysical, sorting reflects our continuing struggle with the true nature of reality and the role of mathematics in its knowing. The now emergent field of computer science removes mathematics even further from intuition and Spirit. Difficult problems such as proofs of theorems can be systematically examined for all possibilities quickly by trying them out in what is now known as a computational proof. On the other hand, pointing at this computation’s graphics, the theorem and proof, real mathematicians can ask, is this really there? 182 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013682