Reuben_Hersh

By George Bergman – https://opc.mfo.de/detail?photo_id=5260, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18096995

Here is the introduction to my article Do Mathematicians Have Responsibilities, published in Humanizing mathematics and its philosophy.Essays celebrating the 90th birthday of Reuben Hersh.Edited by Bharath Sriraman. Birkhäuser/Springer, Cham (2017) 115-123.

I have been an admirer of Reuben Hersh ever since I received a copy of The Mathematical Experience, then brand new, as a birthday present.  At that stage, of course, I was admiring the tandem Reuben formed then, and on other occasions, with his co-author Philip J. Davis.  It was only almost 20 years later, after I started reading What is Mathematics, Really? that I could focus my admiration on Reuben — and not only on the mathematician, the author, the thinker about mathematics, but on the person Reuben Hersh — the unmistakable and unforgettable voice that accompanies the reader from the beginning to the end of the book.  So unforgettable was the voice, in fact, that when Reuben, wrote to me out of the blue three years ago to ask me what I thought about a certain French philosopher, I so clearly heard the voice of the narrator of What is Mathematics, Really? (and no doubt of many of the passages of his books with Davis) that I could honestly write back that I felt like I had known him for decades, though we have never met and until that time we had never exchanged a single word.

The voice in question is the voice of an author who is struggling to put words on an intense and intensely felt experience, who has intimate knowledge of how it feels to be a mathematician and also a knowledge no less intimate of the inadequacy of the language of our philosophical tradition to do justice to that experience, so that all attempts to do so inevitably end in failure; but this knowledge is compensated by the conviction that the stakes are so important that we can’t choose not to try.   What makes Reuben’s authorial voice compelling is that it sounds just as we expect the voice of a person in the middle of that struggle must sound.[1]   It’s the strength of this conviction that comes across in Reuben’s writing, so that reading his books and essays is remembered (by me, at least) as a conversation, a very lively conversation, filled with the passionate sense that we are talking about something that matters.  Also filled with disagreements — because I don’t always agree with everything I read in Reuben’s books and essays; beyond questions of detail the difference might come down to my sense that Reuben is trying to get to the bottom of the mathematical experience, whereas I apprehend the experience as bottomless; or I might say that it’s the effort to get to its bottom that is at the bottom of the experience.  But the differences are of little moment; what stays with me after reading a few pages of Reuben’s writing is the wholeness of the human being reflected in his words, a human being who cares so deeply about his mathematical calling that he is ready to add his own heroic failure to the long list of admirable failures by the most eminent philosophers of the western tradition to account for mathematics; and without these inevitable failures we would not begin to understand why it does matter to us.

[1] As I wrote that sentence I remembered that I have still not met Reuben, nor have I ever spoken to him; but I checked one of the videos online in which he appears and, sure enough, his literal voice is very much as I expected.