Advanced and higher maths in Academia is far from being in a satisfactory state.  The Barons of Silicon Valley have been pouring scorn onto the thinking and culture surrounding higher “Modern Maths” since 1960. They regard it as an artificial ego trip. They have been claiming for more than 60 years —in brazen contradiction to all the facts—  that <<computers have nothing to do with maths!>>. (This blatant lie, they thought, was necessary if they were to sell their PCs to the ordinary public.) They have seized possession of all the subject’s significant “applications”, and thus stolen what was the mainstream subject’s previous well-earned thunder. At the same time they have brazenly credited computing as the (electronic) source of the magic which makes their applications work —rather than recognising that it is the background mathematising which is at the heart of the deal. 

The Barons begged the question by introducing the dodgy term ‘computer modelling’ … which implies that it is the computer which does the modelling.  But computers don’t do any “modelling” (=thinking outside the box).  What the computer does is to implement a modelling agenda which has been dreamt-up by the modeller… a previously unguessed speil of processes, the fruit of rare skills, realistic awareness, determination, imagination, synoptic reasoning, etc..

 They have used their powerful machines greatly to enhance all kinds of easy, trivial applications of maths, especially the most lucrative ones. But they have not taken the trouble to insist on rigorous standards in relation to the most challenging mathematical models.  This has led to too many disastrously inadequate, unsound, fantasy models, especially in economics and finance. These have given mathematical modelling a bad press… This perverse conclusion indicates that the computerists have cultivated a sub-standard, nonsensical, negligent guardianship of the activity of modelling mathematics. If it had been widely recognised (as it should have been) that computers merely implement an automated version of maths, this own goal would never have happened.

So we urgently need this public recognition from the Barons of Silicon Valley that their activities enable automated maths.  Advances in electronics and microchips have contributed much to the speed and power of this automation, but they do not “do the maths”.  Human thinkers are needed to do the maths, though brash, data-grabbing AI is, unsurprisingly, able to copy simple existing programming know-how —and subsequently to claim that it has the power to think!

The pursuit of modelling scientific and real-world projects with advanced maths is not any kind of substandard or “betrayal”.  It is, rather, the long over-due recognition that maths is the science of hypotheses, and that it is the human race’s main, most trusted, priceless, pathfinding, illuminative discipline.  Today we urgently need a great deal of such pathfinding… to focus on a happier, better-constructed, future.

A PRIZE OFFER

To mark the 5-year anniversary of his so-far unchallenged on-line exposition of his “bare hands” proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, the author has decided to offer a reward of £3,000 to the first person who can find a self-evidently exposition-derailing mistake in the on-line argument. Those who take part will have to recruit  two independent colleagues to check and confirm his or her claim —they will each receive £1000.

The exposition is on blogs 1 and 2 of this website.

The offer expires on July 1^st 2025 and if no disproof has been forthcoming, the author intends to treat the default assumption as being that <<the reasoning is most likely correct>>.  Send your name, address, disproving reasoning, and confirming colleague names,  to:  per4group@gmail.com .

CHRISTOPHER ORMELL around June 1^st 2025. chrisormell@aol.com