Very struck by a passage in W. W. Sawyer’s Prelude to Mathematics (dating from 1955) concerning ‘unification’ in mathematics:
…hundreds of papers are written, each clarifying one facet of the truth; the subject is growing. … It then ceases to be necessary to read the hundreds of separate contributions… The variegated results are welded together into a single doctrine… The new methods having become common property, new problems are found which they are insufficient to solve…new papers are published; expansion begins again. There always is, there always will be something to learn, something to conquer.
Citation
BibTeX citation:
@online{mansfield2012,
author = {Mansfield, Kevin},
title = {Unification in {Mathematics}},
date = {2012-03-07},
url = {https://kpmansfield.github.io/posts/2025-05-26/},
langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Mansfield, Kevin. 2012. “Unification in Mathematics.” March
7, 2012. https://kpmansfield.github.io/posts/2025-05-26/.