THE UNREASONABLE EFFECTIVENSS OF （不合理的供方使用的）.pdf

Reprinted from Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 13, No. I (February 1960). New York: John Wiley Sons, Inc. Copyright © 1960 by John Wiley Sons, Inc. THE UNREASONABLE EFFECTIVENSS OF MATHEMATICS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES Eugene Wigner Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. - BERTRAND RUSSELL, Study of Mathematics There is a story about two friends, who were classmates in high school, talking about their jobs. One of them became a statistician and was working on population trends. He showed a reprint to his former classmate. The reprint started, as usual, with the Gaussian distribution and the statistician explained to his former classmate the meaning of the symbols for the actual population, for the average population, and so on. His classmate was a bit incredulous and was not quite sure whether the statistician was pulling his leg. How can you know that? was his query. And what is this symbol here? Oh, said the statistician, this is pi. What is that? The ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter. Well, now you are pushing your joke too far, said the classmate, surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle.