The opinion leaders in maths tried, around 1900, to rethink maths’ public footprint as a much admired discipline. They tried to turn it into an artform, which was so heavily admired by the educated public that it could be a credible “end in itself”.

The opinion leaders felt at the time that the sheer daunting complexity and mystique of “modern maths” justified this change, but that, in practice, the best mathematicians were acting as “problem-solvers” for the physicists.  They figured that this sub-servient role vis-à-vis physics was occluding their subject’s true, inherent status. They thought higher maths should “come of age”, and should be recognised as the most difficult, intellectually challenging activity, facing the human race.    

Fast-forward 126 years and the outlook for maths, treated as an “end in itself” is now rather poor. The educated public’s former adulation of maths has effectively disappeared. Kurt Godel showed nearly a hundred years ago that maths was incompletable, but at the time it was common knowledge that unanswered, neglected, questions in maths were to be found in every part of the subject. This presence of endless askable questions in maths had been established beyond doubt by the Temple Geometry craze in Japan in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. In the end, though, the Japanese recognised that they were pursuing an empty dream. There was an abundance of busy-work maths to be explored… thus giving the illusion that progress was happening, but it was not contributing any clarity whatever to the unsolved, serious, real, practical issues of the day.

The Computer Establishment have been, in effect, rubbishing the good name of maths now for nearly seventy years. From their point of view “maths” is “old hat”,  and computing has superseded it in every possible way. But this point-of-view is stubbornly myopic. The computer is just a device which automates maths, and the idea that automated maths is generally more powerful than unautomated maths is just a truism.

But automated maths can’t appear until someone has actually done (conceptualised) the maths.     

There are, of course, brilliant mathematical insights which are capable of opening problems which it would take centuries of crude electronic searching to reach a conclusion.  But the Computer Establishment is opportunistic, and they will, of course, incorporate any such insight as soon as possible into their repertoire.

The High Priests of maths are inclined to treat the effect of the arrival of computers as being similar to the arrival of helicopters for rock climbers.  But rock climbers consciously put their lives at risk… which creates a sense of intense personal meaning —something not available to star mathematicians.  The result is that the quest to solve formidable mathematic problems has lost most of its appeal. Only the super stars of maths tend to be fascinated now by these artificial challenges. They won’t improve the living experience of ordinary people in any way. They don’t even give the ordinary person any vicarious bragging rights, because the hyper-abstruse concepts involved are far beyond their mathematic powers.    

To comment on the reasoning, email:  per4group@gmail.com
CHRISTOPHER ORMELL around April 1^st 2026. chrisormell@aol.com