How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

by Jordan Ellenberg

And you can’t deny that there are aspects of the natural world—I’m thinking pandas here—that seem more likely to have resulted from grudging bureaucratic compromise than from the mind of an all-knowing deity with total creative control.

That's right...

Mathematics, mostly, is a communal enterprise, each advance the product of a huge network of minds working toward a common purpose, even if we accord special honor to the person who places the last stone in the arch. Mark Twain is good on this: “It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others.”

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