The Mathematician as an Explorer

The nature of mathematics is elucidated by one mathematician’s account of how a memory word used by drummers in ancient India led him to the classic problem of the traveling salesman’s route Mathematics, like every branch of knowledge, is the product of the interplay between past and present, between accumulated knowledge and curiosity, between an autonomous structure and the tastes and needs of the time. What one age considers a pressing question, another may not ask at all. The pure mathematics of one era may be applied in another, perhaps centuries later.

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The Mathematician as an Explorer