Log24

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Annals of Mathematics

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:35 pm

University Diaries praised today the late Robert Nozick's pedagogical showmanship.

His scholarship was less praiseworthy. His 2001 book Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World  failed, quite incredibly, to mention Hermann Weyl's classic summary of  the connection between invariance and objectivity.  See a discussion of Nozick in The New York Review of Books  of December 19, 2002

"… one should mention, first and foremost, the mathematician Hermann Weyl who was almost obsessed by this connection. In his beautiful little book Symmetry  he tersely says, 'Objectivity means invariance with respect to the group of automorphisms….'"

See also this journal on Dec. 3, 2002, and Feb. 20, 2007.

For some context, see a search on the word stem "objectiv-" in this journal.

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress