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[HM] Weil and sculpture
Posted:
May 22, 2003 5:38 AM
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In a letter to his sister Simone, Andre Weil writes:
You doubt and with good reason that modern axiomatics is serious work.
When I invented
(I say invented, and not discovered) uniform spaces, I did not have the
impression of working
with resistant material, but rather the impression that a professional
sculptor must have when
he plays by making a snowman.
(Translation by Martin Krieger in his very interesting 'Doing
Mathematics' World Scientific
Publishing 2003)
Now I have a faint memory of Weil likening doing mathematics to
sculpting from a hard rock
(porphyry?), and mentioning Michelangelo's notion that one is freeing
the sculpture from the
rock. If so, this would suggest a distinction he's making between the
ease with which one
can invent a 'flabby' concept to embrace some range of instances and the
sensitivity required to
get things right in other situations.
Is my memory playing tricks on me?
David Corfield
Faculty of Philosophy
10 Merton St.
Oxford OX1 4JJ
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfop0076
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