"The question is often asked... why Mathematicians cannot restrict themselves more to those aspects of their Science which bring them in contact with Physics, and which are concerned with what often receives the question-begging and ambiguous name of reality; a word that has an indefinite number of shades of meaning, varying with every difference in philosophical view, but which in this connection is generally associated with... the physical world. Why... do modern Mathematicians... wander away from the source... from which its ever-renewed inspiration has been received, in order to lose themselves in a transcendentalism which, in its aloofness from physical investigation, condemns them to an endless and barren immersion in abstractions of their own creation? ...cut ...off from the roots of the Science?"
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Mathematics, from the points of view of the Mathematician and of the Physicist
Mathematics, from the points of view of the Mathematician and of the Physicist: An address delivered to the Mathematical and Physical Society of University College, London by E. W. Hobson, Sc.D., LL.D., F.R.S., in the University of Cambridge, was published at the University Press, Cambridge in 1912.
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