1. Why do you think people become mathematicians?

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2. What are the motivations for educated, brigh people to become involved in mathematics?

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3. What factors are important in deciding what particuW dis­cipline within the frames of your future profession to prefer?

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4. Say what matters to you and what matters to most people in your opinion.

Task 2. Consider a list of key words taken from the text and try to guess what ideas and concepts are stated in it.

Mathematics department, practical application, good mathematics, pure mathematics, possible applications of pure mathematics, “real” mathematics, “real” mathematicians, “useless” mathematics, triv­ial mathematics, useful mathematics, real creative work, expository works in and about mathematics, relativity and quantum mechan­ics, theory of numbers, stellar astronomy, atomic physics, practi­cal importance, to have an effect on war, warlike purpose, paci­fism, harmlessness of mathematics, chemistry, poison gases, “use­ful” science, engineering, designing war planes, service of war, twenty three outstanding unsolved problems, conflict between pure and applied mathematics, unapplicability of pure mathematics, aura of non-respectability.

We hope the following names mentioned in the article will give you a prompt as to what ideas and concepts are stated in the text. Read them.

G. H. Hardy, Fermat, Euler, Gauss, Riemann, J. E. Little- wood, S. Ramanujan, Maxwell, Einstein, Eddington, Dirac, Hitler, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, David Hilbert, Felix Klein, E. T. Bell, Archimedes, Newton, Lagrange, Laplace, Fourier, Her­man Weyl, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann.

Are these names familiar to you? What do you know about them? Share everything you know about these persons with your classmates.

You are unlikely to know much about Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. Below you will find two entries for them taken from The Hutchinson Pocket Encyclopedia.

Baldwin Stanley, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley (1867-1947). British Conservative politician, prime minister (1923-24, 1924-29, 1935-37); he weathered the general strike (1926), secured complete adult suffrage (1928), and handled the abdication of Edward VIII (1936)V but failed to prepare Britain for World War II.

Chamberlain (Arthur) Neville (1869-1940). British Con­servative politician, son of Joseph Chamberlain. He was prime minister (1937-40). Trying to close the old Anglo-Irish feud, he agreed to return to Eire those ports that had been occupied by the navy. He also attempted to appease the demands of the European dictators, particularly Mussolini. In 1938 he went to Munich and

negotiated with Hitler the settlement of the Czechoslovak question. He was ecstatically received on his return and claimed that the Munich Agreement brought "peace in our time.” Within a year, however, Britain was at war with Germany. He resigned in 1940 following the defeat of British forces in Norway.

5 10 15 20 25 Task 3. Read the text quickly.

MATHEMATICS

FORTY YEARS AFTER SPUTNIK (extract 1)

When I was a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1950s, the question of whether anything that was taught or studied in the mathematics department had any practical applications could not even be asked, let alone discussed. This was not unique to Harvard. Good mathematics had to be pure mathematics, and by definition it was not permissible to talk about possible applications of pure mathematics.

This view was not invented by G. H. Hardy, the great British number theorist, but he was certainly one of its most eloquent and influential exponents. In A Mathematician’s Apology, pub* lished in 1940, Hardy wrote, “Very little of mathematics is useful practically, and ... that little is comparatively dull”; and “The ‘real’ mathematics of the real mathematicians, the mathematics of Fermat and Euler and Gauss and Riemann, is almost wholly ‘use­less’”; and “We have concluded that the trivial mathematics is, on the whole, useful, and that the real mathematics, on the whole, is not.”

To other number theorists, Hardy is best known for his col­laborative work with J. E. Littlewood and with the Indian math­ematical prodigy S. Ramanujan. He was well known for claiming that mathematician^ did their real creative work by age thirty-five, and he dedicated his own later years to expository works in and about mathematics. The Apology was published when Hardy was sixty-three, seven years before his death.