Healthy Mathematics

This Sunday reflection from Ian Stewart in the 2nd edition (1992) of “The Problems of Mathematics”:

“Some observers have professed to detect, in the variety and freedom of today’s mathematics, symptoms of decadence and decline. They tell us that mathematics has fragmented into unrelated specialties, has lost its sense of unity, and has no idea where it is going. They speak of a ‘crisis’ in mathematics, as if the whole subject has collectively taken a wrong turning. There is no crisis. Today’s mathematics is healthy, vigorous, unified, and as relevant to the rest of human culture as it ever was… If there appears to be a crisis, it is because the subject has become too large for any single person to grasp… today’s mathematics is not some outlandish aberration: it is a natural continuation of the mathematical mainstream. It is abstract and general, and rigorously logical, not out of perversity, but because this appears to be the only way to get the job done properly. It contains numerous specialties, like most sciences nowadays, because it has flourished and grown. Today’s mathematics has succeeded in solving problems that baffled the greatest minds of past centuries. Its most abstract theories are currently finding new applications to fundamental questions in physics, chemistry, biology, computing, and engineering. Is this decadence and decline? I doubt it.”