Many years ago the Midgleys were in Sacramento, California, for the night. We had a reservation at a nice place to sleep, but before we checked in, we though that we would pick up some Dr. Pepper and two sandwiches to eat after we got settled in. So went into something like a convenience store. And we immediately discovered some very rough looking Blacks in it--with guns yet. We were terrified. But immediately in came some Black cops who ordered us to leave, as they began arresting those armed Blacks, who the police called thugs.
Only one other time have I been suddenly terrified by what was taking place. This was in New York City, when we got caught in a street with white police on horses yet chasing and arresting some fleeing young fellows.
When I once directed what was called the BYU Washington Seminar, my wife and I tried to visit Howard University, which is a very fine Black university, with its own stop on the Metro, if I remember correctly. But the place then had a wire fence and guard posts, and one needed papers to enter. We were told that those who worked or studied at Howard University needed to be protected in what was a rough neighborhood around it. It is a very expensive major research university.
Hardy agreed on the other hand that Ramanujan often did seem to make bizarre leaps. Many of Ramanujan's most famous theorems are weird answers to weird questions. Hardy assumed this was due to the fact that Ramanujan was a mathematical autodidact who had never been formally trained. Was that a good thing? Would formal training have killed Ramanujan's wonderfully free intuition and made him a dull normal thinker instead of a genius? Hardy considered that view but dismissed it as silly romanticism. It was a shame that Ramanujan hadn't been properly trained, Hardy thought. If Ramanujan had been properly trained, he would have done even better work than he did, and would not have wasted as much of his talent on weird trivia.
Hardy himself was a great mathematician and a famous eccentric. He was the one mathematician, out of the many to whom Ramanujan sent his screed of weird theorems, who saw the brilliance through the weirdness. So I figure his judgement on this is probably better than anyone else's. Ramanujan wasn't brilliant because he had an erratic way of thinking: he was so brilliant that he produced a lot of good work in spite of his erratic way of thinking.
It sounds like Hardy was eccentric and judgmental. He was open minded enough to see Ramanujan was a genius, but at the same time judged his genius to lack the aesthetic elegance or practical utility proper training would have helped him obtain? Why not simply appreciate the value of what R had to offer and consider the possibility that weird problems may have unforeseen applicability?
Sorry for jumping into the conversation.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Hardy was sort of judgmental. He liked to assign people scores, from 0 to 100, in each of a number of peculiar categories that he had defined.
I read about this in a biographical sketch of Hardy by C.P. Snow, which probably isn't hard to track down. I forget some of what Snow recounted but I remember that three of Hardy's categories were "Bleak", "Stark", and "Old Brandy". The only definitions of Bleak and Stark that I remember are something like "not all Stark people are Bleak, but all Bleak people want to be Stark." Also that the first Duke of Wellington was assigned 100 for Stark. "Old Brandy" was a category named for some guy who drank nothing but old brandy, and was supposed to indicate behavior that was wildly eccentric but not completely indefensible.
I can't say whether Hardy's judgement of Ramanujan was fair or not. I don't know the work of either in any detail, or even the fields in which they worked. Some of what they did is close enough to stuff I know that I can use their results, and have some notion of how they got them, but I've never read a paper by either of them. I'm inclined to figure that Hardy probably did have a point, though, because in those fields that I do know more closely, it seems to me that it's easier for an outsider to think vaguely of mysteriously brilliant intuitions than to imagine the technical skills that are involved in those fields.
Maybe I also failed to convey the nature of Hardy's concern about Ramanujan. He didn't fault what Ramanujan actually did. He was himself a collaborator of Ramanujan in much of it, after all. He thought that Ramanujan could have done more, if he had been properly trained. Ramanujan's oeuvre doesn't include any really enormous contributions to mathematics. He didn't solve any problems that had been outstanding for centuries, or create any entirely new subjects. Hardy and others who knew Ramanujan and could judge seem to have had the feeling that maybe Ramanujan could have done something gigantic.
How is it in history? Are there self-taught historians who bring brilliant insights despite never having had any formal training in the discipline? If so, are they really somehow better off because they lacked the training, or would proper training have made them even better as historians?
Last edited by Physics Guy on Wed Apr 28, 2021 11:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
How is it in history? Are there self-taught historians who bring brilliant insights despite never having had any formal training in the discipline? If so, are they really somehow better off because they lacked the training, or would proper training have made them even better as historians?
In response to this, I would have to say that I am more surprised that historian counts as a profession. There are so many good amateur historians out there and so many crummy professional historians. Maybe I am just in one of those moods, but I am inclined to say that being "trained" does not make one a great historian, but lacking training more noticeably sets apart mediocrities into different categories. Also, I recall that Peter Brown, the "inventor" of Late Antiquity did not complete his dissertation, which was under the supervision of Arnaldo Momigliano. I wouldn't say that he counts as untrained, but his story does show that the PhD in itself does not necessarily say much.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
I am curious about midgleys NYC story though. He has found himself in the middle of police action far too often to just be coincidental!
I read his comments again, he's so clueless, and to think he's a political science professor of something like 73 years.
My unhinged right-wing neighbor tells stories exactly as Midgley tells them. He tells me he was raised to treat people of all colors equally. Okay great (and in practice he does, it's really weird. I doubt Midgley has the equivalent credibility here). But anyway, he has two or three stories, like the Midge, where he found himself in a black neighborhood and could have been in danger. In one case, a cop stopped him and told him to get out. He tells these stories whenever he wants to make the point that blacks are racist towards whites, while whites are generally taught to treat people equally.
Midge's point is similar, that based on these three experiences, blacks are dangerous to be around. The big difference is that my neighbor has like a 5th-grade education and can barely write a sentence (he's a semi-wealthy contractor though). In fact, Mr. M was recently complaining about the poor methods used in the fictitious Mike Quinn sex survey. Indeed, his experiences tell us exactly nothing, except about his own prejudices. His response was to Mary Ward's quite hostile comment. Neither DCP nor Kiwi57 dared to upvote that comment.
Looks like Chapstick's honest posting style is too much for Mr. Midgley:
Midgley wrote:“What exactly is ‘really interesting’ about Chapstick in his various ‘persona’ is that he is dedicated to trying his best to being annoying. I cannot be the only one who finds Chapstick tedious and also more than a bit annoying.
I will donate $200 to the Interpreter Foundation when I am confident that Chaptstick has been given the boot. Please note that I did not just pick that amount of dollars out of thing air, like I believe Chapstick once did, but then failed to send the check.”
