Modernism

Modernism
   Modernism Begins with the Theory of Numbers
   Gottlob Frege, Georg Cantor, and Richard Dedekind were pure mathematicians who built no machines; but they did provide a means, laying the foundations of a new way of thinking in the West. If there is any utility to Modernism, Dedekind did something profoundly useful. The great event . . . came in the year he wrote his first letter to a fellow mathematician named Georg Cantor, and soon after published a mathematical definition of irrational numbers now known as the "Dedekind Cut." Separating forever the digital from the continuous, at least in arithmetic, Dedekind became the West's first Modernist in 1872. Everyone who has heard of Modernism has heard of Picasso. Most have heard of Joyce. But who has heard of Dedekind? Only mathematicians, the least likelylooking of those who aspire to change the world by using their minds. The public doesn't know what mathematicians are doing, and mathematicians are just as happy it doesn't, for they are as genuinely unworldly as artists claim to be. . . . Mathematicians did not invent. Instead, they insisted, they discovered things as Plato had-searching in a complicated alternate universe for elegant and beautiful relationships among objects that could not be said to exist outside the mind.
   Without their knowledge, however, the mathematicians of 1870s Germany were about to change the world. As a clutch of Victorian professors, avuncular, ascetic, . . . they were gathering unawares around the cradle of an infant Briar Rose that would one day be christened Modernism. (Everdell, 1997, pp. 30-31)

Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science. . 2015.

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  • modernism — (n.) 1737, deviation from the ancient and classical manner [Johnson, who calls it a word invented by Swift ], from MODERN (Cf. modern) + ISM (Cf. ism). From 1830 as modern ways and styles. Used in theology since 1901. As a movement in the arts… …   Etymology dictionary

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