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- Newsgroups: sci.math
- Path: sparky!uunet!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!galois!nevanlinna!jbaez
- From: jbaez@nevanlinna.mit.edu (John C. Baez)
- Subject: Re: Category theory funded by DOD?
- Message-ID: <1992Aug12.225929.3510@galois.mit.edu>
- Sender: news@galois.mit.edu
- Nntp-Posting-Host: nevanlinna
- Organization: MIT Department of Mathematics, Cambridge, MA
- References: <1165@kepler1.rentec.com> <1992Aug11.160727.27151@galois.mit.edu> <25401@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
- Distribution: na
- Date: Wed, 12 Aug 92 22:59:29 GMT
- Lines: 25
-
- In article <25401@dog.ee.lbl.gov> sichase@csa2.lbl.gov writes:
- >In article <1992Aug11.160727.27151@galois.mit.edu>, jbaez@nevanlinna.mit.edu (John C. Baez) writes...
- >>
- >>The problem with physicists is that they got so good at blowing things up
- >>that we no longer need bigger bombs. So while a "functor bomb" would be
- >>amusing it would not bring in grants.
- >
- >That's a little too harsh a stab at physicists, considering that one of the big
- >players at Los Alamos was Stan Ulam - a mathematician who contributed as much to
- >the bomb effort as any man did.
-
- It wasn't meant to be a stab at physicists; certainly the fact that many
- mathematicians are bad at inventing bombs doesn't give them any moral
- superiority over physicists, and as you point out there were some
- mathematicians that WERE good at inventing bombs - didn't von Neumann
- also play a key role. (Both von Neumann and Ulam were good at too many
- things to really fit as a mathematician or a physicist, actually.) My
- point was simply that even if one could build a big bomb using category
- theory, it wouldn't be clear that the government should fund it.
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