The Two Cultures of Mathematics | The n-Category Café
Note:These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards. They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in Mozilla. My best suggestion (and you will thank me when surfing an ever-increasing number of sites on the web which have been crafted to use the new standards) is to upgrade to the latest version of your browser. If that's not possible, consider moving to the Standards-compliant and open-source Mozilla browser. Part of what intrigues me about reading Terence Tao’s blog is that he displays there a different aesthetic to the one largely admired here. The best effort to capture this difference is, I believe, Timothy Gowers’ essay The Two Cultures of Mathematics, in which the distinction is made between ‘theory-builders’ and ‘problem-solvers’. I think we have to be very careful with