The modern separation among scholars between intellectual history and the history of mathematics is untenable as mathematics might be the ultimate intellectual endeavour. In the words of the 19th-century German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss: ‘mathematics is the queen of the sciences’; like literacy, widespread numeracy is one of the defining features of modernity. In fact, one of the great shifts of modernity has been how mathematicians changed their view of mathematics, transforming the focus of their work from the study of the natural world to the study of ideas and concepts.
Article source here:Arts Journal
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