Aesthetics for the working mathematician

Jonathan M. Borwein

pp. 21-40

in: Nathalie Sinclair, David Pimm, William Higginson (eds), Mathematics and the aesthetic, Berlin, Springer, 2007

Abstract

If my teachers had begun by telling me that mathematics was pure play with presuppositions, and wholly in the air, I might have become a good mathematician, because I am happy enough in the realm of essence. But they were over-worked drudges, and I was largely inattentive, and inclined lazily to attribute to incapacity in myself or to a literary temperament that dullness which perhaps was due simply to lack of initiation. (Santayana, 1944, p. 238)