Tag: Keynes

Here is my burnt offering upon the unholy alter of quit-lit.

This spring I sat on a career advice panel in Montreal at the Geometry of Subgroups conference, offering my thoughts from the perspective of someone who recently jumped from academia to industry. As fine as the panel was, I am frustrated at how far short I fell of what I felt should be said. So here is my attempt at better expressing myself. If you have more questions, feel free to pass them on to me, and maybe I’ll do another round. The more impertinent the questions, the better.

Q: If I quit mathematics, can I really consider myself to be a mathematician. Like, really?

There is a rich historical tradition of mathematicians leaving academia and going out into the world to do other things.

  • Isaac Newton in his later years tired of his cushy Cambridge position and wanted an exciting job in the capital. He became Warden of the Royal Mint and oversaw the Great Recoinage of 1696 (there is a book about the whole story).
  • John von Neumann had an impact on the post war world that I cannot adequately describe in a few sentences. But his work consulting with the US defense department led one recent AMS review of a recent biography to spend time addressing the question of whether or not he was evil.
  • Jim Simons ran off and started one of the world’s most successful hedge funds. He was successful in large part by employing quants — phds from scientific rather than financial backgrounds. He made so much money doing this he created the Simons Foundation. If you’ve ever read a Quanta magazine article, he paid for that (it certainly isn’t a revenue generating enterprise).
  • Robert Zimmer ascended to administrative heights, becoming Chicago University president. He was so celebrated that after his passing the NYT columnist Bret Stephens gave an invited Class Day speech complaining about cancel culture in tribute.
  • Alexander Grothendieck founded a commune, and later became a reclusive shepherd.
  • John Meynard Keynes got drawn into economics, trying to prevent World War 2, and founding the welfare state. (The real takeaway of all this is that you should go and read The Price of Peace by Zachary D. Carter).
  • Richard Garfield did his PhD in combinatorics, but found his dreams really came true when a dinky card game he designed became the international sensation known as Magic: The Gathering. It is only a matter of time before MTG cards become accepted as international reserve currency.

Being an mathematician at an academic institution is a very narrow avenue of human experience, and plenty of successful mathematicians have had healthy appreciation of this.

Q : Why did you quit mathematics?

Principally to resolve a two body problem; I was separated from my partner by the UK travel ban to the US during the pandemic. I saw my chances of getting a suitable job as being so negligible that as soon as my visa was approved, I quit my job, the UK, and flew over the Atlantic to get married and pursue the American Dream. I had another year to my postdoc, but considered waiting another year to be abject foolishness. Being separated from my partner by the pandemic did dramatic things to my tolerance of that situation. I certainly wasn’t willing to protract it any further on the vague possibility that something might turn up for me on the job market. At least part of this intensity of feeling was Pandemic induced, but it was pretty consistent with my general thinking. I’m a lot more mellow about the way it all worked out now I’m on the other side of it.

Q : Why couldn’t you get a job?

There a number of reasons. My job search became progressively more restricted as efforts to resolve my two body problem restricted me geographically. I was applying into the US, a highly competitive market, with a real lack of suitable teaching experience. I also didn’t have any fancy grants, and although I had a very fancy Oxford postdoc, I don’t believe it would have moved the needle in the same way as having a NSF grant. (A grant which is very important in the US, and I have never been eligible to even apply for). My visibility in the US was pretty low due to giving almost no talks while doing my PhD in Canada, and then being out in Israel and the UK. I certainly invited myself to seminars when I was stateside, but I was never invited to give conference talks or present at AMS meetings, which would have done a lot more. I was interviewed, once for a postdoc position when I finished my PhD and that is the most interest the US job market has ever shown. My strongest research and fanciest papers were produced towards the end of my time in math — during the pandemic, in fact. My fortunes would have been significantly different if I had finished my PhD with such results. My best chance of getting a job was probably when my partner got a bunch of job offers, but none of them were willing/able to consider a spousal hire. That kind of thing seems to work out for other people.

Q: Do you think it represents an institutional failure that someone as talented as yourself cannot get a job?

I obviously like to hear that people appreciated the work that I did, and I am very proud of it. But it is worth considering what this question might mean. The math job market is zero sum in every meaningful sense.
If you want there to be more nice research jobs to be available, sure, that would be nice, but that is a very general complaint, and applies as much to everyone else as to me. (Pure mathematicians are the only people who feel this way. Most people want more doctors, nurses, and teachers). If you think I am better qualified than some of the people getting the jobs, then maybe or maybe not, but that is very hard to speak to. Generally, it is worth being humble about how limited your judgment is about all the mathematics being done, and how strong the other candidates out there are.

Q: Why do other people quit mathematics?

They can’t get the job they want. They don’t believe they can get the job they want. They get bored with mathematics (or at least they way it ultimately gets practiced). They get a job and realize they don’t like some aspect of it, and it’s very difficult to get another job. They become interested in doing something else. They become interested in the idea of making lots of money. They need to make more money. They become sickened by the scientific community’s connections to the military industrial complex.

Q: Why do so many mathematicians leave academia and then go into tech and finance?

The short answer is because that is where the money and opportunity is, but there is a far better, longer answer that makes such a decision look far more sympathetic. Getting an academic, tenure track job is an example of what I will call a prestige vocation. There are other examples, mostly creative pursuits, but the easiest identifier is whether you can imagine a MasterClass (TM) Video Series being taught by someone doing this job. These jobs tend to have limited opportunities, fought over by highly qualified, highly educated, frequently highly privileged individuals, who have to stick it out in subordinate positions for many years. At the same time the industry itself either isn’t particularly lucrative, or even profit driven at all, from a market perspective. In some of the worst examples, aspirants are often required to pay increasing amounts for the degrees and accreditation just to access the bottom rungs.

Often this was different, many generations ago, but not anymore. Frequently people in these fields are overworked and underappreciated, becoming a miserable and dispirited. So when a mathematician jumps ship they would be wise to avoid making the same mistake again, and if you are a mathematician then there are these two industries that are ready and happy to put you to work.

As prestige vocations go, mathematics is probably one of the best. You are paid to go to graduate school, and there are a lots of perks like getting to travel. Best of all, you get to do mathematics.
You actually get to do the thing. You aren’t an assistant or an extra on a film set waiting for your moment.
You aren’t an editorial assistant with no time to work on your own novel. You get to do your thing.
Frequently, people do get the kind of job they are after — and maybe you will too! And, when the opportunities run out, you have a kind of training and qualification that you can convert into a new career.

It is also worth saying something about the tech industry. Computers are fascinating engines of mathematics worthy of a little respect. I often think about Frank Nelson Cole. In 1903 he gave an AMS presentation entirely devoted to multiplying 193,707,721 and 761,838,257,287 to demonstrate he had factorized the Mersenne number 147,573,952,589,676,412,927. According to his own report, discovering the factors had taken three years of Sundays. Today, I can spend 5 minutes writing a program in python that will discover the prime factors in a couple of seconds.

Q: Do you spend all your time wishing you had a nice tenure track job at a research university?

Not really. Getting a tenure track job, even a nice one, would have been a considerable change of pace. Assuming that the set-up resolved my personal situation as conveniently as my current job, a lot would have changed: more teaching, more meetings, and more responsibilities. Do the right postdocs and you can avoid all that until you hit the tenure track, but risk possibly ruling yourself out from the running for many such jobs.

I feel like I had a lot to bring to the table as a teacher, that I never really had the opportunity to offer. It would have been a lot of fun to have clever graduate students to farm out all the problems I couldn’t solve. I think I would have been a good graduate student supervisor.

In terms of the research, I now have a solid appreciation the amount of work that is involved to make substantial contributions happen. I don’t rue what I wasn’t able to do. In my more reflective moments, I rue the fact I can’t go back and become a graduate student again with all that I now know. If I were really dead set on returning to academia, my best bet would be to change my name, choose a distant, unrelated, but similarly exciting field, lie about my age, and start all over. I’d fucking kill the second time around. Leave everyone else for dead. Be feted within that clique, crank out some collaborations with the top peeps, and then when I collect my Fields medal all the geometric group theorists would jump out their seats and exclaim “That’s Daniel. He’s an old man! Take that prize away from him, the fraud!”

Q: Should I become a data scientist?

I can’t tell you what you should do. You have to look into your heart. Data scientist is a popular option and you can probably discuss that career with people who have actually gone away and done it. There are many such careers you might think about. Software engineering, AI, actuarial science, consulting, options trader, teacher, project manager, life coach, technical writer, substacker, astronaut. I can’t tell you how realistic or suitable any of them are for you. I can’t tell you what positions to apply for. I can’t tell you what company to try and work for. Academia offered a very limited range of opportunities and people generally would apply for almost anything and take what they could get. When you make the jump you have to think more carefully and act more deliberately.

Where would you like to work?
Would you like to work remotely?
Do you want to work for a nonprofit?
Do you want to work for a large or small company?
A startup?
Do you want to travel?
Would you like to work with customers?
Would you like to go into management?
Do you want to work for a public or privately traded company?
What sectors do you want to work in?
The financial sector?
Advertising?
The arms industry?
You should have opinions on these and other questions and let them guide you.

I know someone who quit academia and went off cycling around South America until Covid put an end to that. You have to respect the ability to make such decisions.

Q: Can I get a job in the tech sector without programming experience?

Yes, but you should spend time learning to program. Enough that at least you can do the interview style problems you can find on leet code. It is then important to find a job opening where they are sympathetic to your case and will appreciate what you can offer. There are many companies that understand that the ability to program can be learned on the job, but many of the qualities you have — mathematical facility, for one — are not so easy to find. There are many jobs you will not be qualified for (at least not at first), so you should keep an open mind about what you can do.

Q: What advice would you give for getting a job?

  1. I don’t know how long the transition will take, but I psychologically prepared for six months. The good news is you can start investigating and preparing in small ways and big ways, even before actually quitting.
  2. Get in contact with people you know or knew who left for industry. They will generally be very willing to talk and help you out. There is a kind of camaraderie among former math/phds. And at many big companies there is a financial reward when someone you refer gets hired.
  3. Get in contact with people you don’t know in industry. There are all kinds of ways to do this. I haven’t investigated them all. But learn to write short, polite emails that get to the point and aren’t weird.
  4. Learn Python. This is worth doing even if you are remaining in academia. Even if you aren’t going into the tech sector. It’s widely used, allows you to script quickly, and there are lots of resources for learning. Having some appreciation of what can be done in code is a very useful skill to have. What constitutes “learning Python” is obviously unclear. But best of all, if you hate it, you have learned that much. All that said, like mathematics, if you don’t have the right kind of motivation, it might be worth not bothering at all.
  5. Write your CV. Get other people to read it.
  6. Don’t be discouraged when your applications are ignored. Probably you didn’t apply for the right position. Half the battle is finding the right position to apply for. You probably don’t even understand what the right position to apply for is. That is why being able to talk to someone like a recruiter is so useful. They might actually know where they can place you. (I had the fortune to talk to an internal recruiter. I hear that external recruiters can be playing a numbers game, and may be less useful.)
  7. Take/audit courses that might be relevant. If you are still in an academic institution, taking a course on the side during a semester is a great way to hedge against the possibility of leaving at a later date. MIT has a bunch of good lectures online.
  8. Trust your mathematical instincts.
  9. Communication skills are valuable, to the point that this is something of a cliche. When I did my technical interview I went into TA mode, explaining what I was doing, and being self-deprecating about saying what I was confused about. If I had to interview again, I’d be 300% better. At least. But I was good enough.
  10. Be interested in what companies do, what people’s jobs involve. Sometimes you just have to ask to learn something useful.

Q: Weren’t you afraid that once you abandoned academia all your accumulated mathematical powers would dissipate, leaving you an empty vessel?

I feel like I spent enough time into the game that the thinking has been inscribed into me in some permanent way. I’ve also concluded that mathematical knowledge and understanding is not some precarious tower built up over successive years that will collapse without careful maintenance.
I believed that when I was an undergraduate, and the cumulative effect of undergraduate education certainly gave that impression. While I think good undergraduate courses should have that satisfying effect, I also suspect it can be harmful when transitioning into research.

Q: Weren’t you afraid of losing all those friends you made in mathematics?

Friends have confessed to me that this has been a non-trivial consideration. What is definitely true is that after a while as a mathematician you know a lot of people attending conferences, and you do enjoy having these regular reunions with them. The important point is that you don’t have to organize the get together (unless you are actually the conference organizer). This is nice, but really you should proactively maintain relationships with friends. Email, whatsapp, or meet up. Postcards are cool.

Q: I feel like my sense of self worth is tied to the mathematics I do, and the mathematical success I aspire to have. Is this a good reason to stay in mathematics?

You should not tie your self worth to success in mathematics. Pick anything else:
Being a good cook.
Having a sick set of shiny OG Pokemon cards.
Reading the poems published in the New Yorker.
Having a super discerning taste in music.
Always doing the washing up immediately after you’ve finished cooking.
Having a article appear on an online humour site.
Raising your FIDE chess ranking.
Raising your chess.com ranking.
Maintaining your wordle averages.
Finishing Gravity’s Rainbow.
Having very tidy cursive handwriting.

Just not being successful in mathematics.

Q: It sounds like by leaving academia and going into industry you have become a little too comfortable with late capitalism.

If you are afraid that I am not a good communist, then you are probably right. But there is a serious point, that isn’t especially political, and might be helpful. You should distinguish between having principals about what kind of work you want to do and being generally squeamish about capitalism. The danger is that when you do start to feel the desperation of finding some kind of job, you will embrace a kind of nihilism and decide that since you can’t achieve the purity of tenured academia, then you might as well make money by whichever means is most lucrative, working for whoever is ready to pay you.

[A quick note: this article lives here, on my blog. If you liked it, please do share it. Otherwise, I can assure you, very few people will find and read it.]

The wrangler’s insecurity.

[This is my third post on Newton. Previous posts: one and two.]

If you were to take a look around you during a math department seminar or colloquium, you would witness the audience’s attention begin to drift as the talk sunk further into detail and became increasingly difficult to follow. Losing interest in a talk is more or less expected, and the professional mathematicians in the audience come prepared. Maybe they bring a paper to read, or possibly exam scripts to grade. Sometimes they will turn to a fresh page of their notebook and begin doing some actual mathematics of their own.

As a graduate student at McGill, I remember watching a postdoc fill up a page with long exact sequences and all kinds of diagrams, the notation veering into doodles as he got stuck at what must have been a familiar dead-end. It was a rare, voyeuristic glimpse into someone else’s solitary mathematical practice. I later asked this postdoc — whose notebook I presumed was full of such pages — if he ever went back and reread what he had written. No, he admitted, with a guilty smile.

Which was a relief. Not only because my own notebooks were full of repetitious dead-ends, but also because I too almost never went back to review anything I’d written.

Much has been made of Imposter Syndrome among academics — doubting whether we have truly earned whatever position we have reached given how paltry our contributions can sometimes feel. There is a related sense of insecurity to be found in wondering if you are doing mathematics correctly. To be clear, I don’t mean whether a proof we have written up is sound, but whether or not our process of formulating and devising them is the the “proper” way. As if there might be a correct way (or even a professional way) of doing mathematics.

These are not new concerns to have.

Isaac Newton was incredibly secretive in his work and did not have anything approaching students as we might describe them. But after his death, the calculus he developed would form the foundation of modern mathematical and scientific education at Cambridge.

Those who scribbled hastily on those exam papers were students, above all, of Newton’s mathematical physics. Though Newton had not cultivated a following during his own tenure at Cambridge, by the end of the eighteenth century the principals laid down in the Principia — and in particular the mathematical contents of that book — formed the basis for an intensely competitive system of testing at the university by which students were ranked in descending order based on their results on terminal examinations. known as the “Mathematical Tripos.” (The origin of the term Tripos is uncertain, but it may refer to the three legged stool on which students originally sat to take the oral examinations.)

The Newton Papers – Sarah Dry, pg 85

The material, and especially the notation, would be modernized as European influences arrived, but Newton did not lose his centrality. The manner in which he actually arrived at his great insights became a matter of interest. There is a great distinction between how discoveries are made, and how they finally appear on the page. Everyone knew how they personally went about doing mathematics, and even how their tutors told them to do mathematics, but was that the same as how Newton went about making his original discoveries? For all they knew, it might have all been provided to him by divine revelation.

On the Quadrature of Curves. See the Cambridge website to view more scans of Newton’s papers.

In 1872 a means of settling the question presented itself. Newton’s papers — or at least a large portion of them, covering far more than mathematical physics — had resided for nearly 150 years in the library of one of England’s aristocratic houses: Hurstbourne park. But now the Earl of Portsmouth was donating the scientific portion of papers back to the University of Cambridge.

Newton had been famously coy about his own methods, suggesting that he had kept his true means of discovering the Principia private and had only cast them publicly in the language of geometry. The question was therefore whether he adhered to the rigorous, manly, and above all morally upright techniques of thinking that Cambridge undergraduates were coached to acquire. To answer this Stokes and Adams were forced to consider whether Newton himself should — or could– be held accountable to the techniques that were mastered in his name. The Newton papers had the potential to probe more deeply the shadowy divide between patient work and divine inspiration, offering the promise of settling not simply what Newton had done but how he had done it. […] the question had a special urgency at Cambridge where the moral value of study was paramount. In that respect the Newton papers mattered for every undergraduate preparing for the Tripos and for what the Tripos itself stood for. Would the man who served as a model for what should be learned also reveal himself through his private papers, as a model for how to learn?

The Newton Papers – Sarah Dry, pg 88

Sarah Dry, author of The Newton Papers, a chronicle of the journey Newton’s writings took after his death, presents an interesting comparison of the two mathematicians, John Couch Adams and George Gabriel Stokes, who were tasked with making sense of his old notebook papers.

John Couch Adams (1819-1882),

On the one hand was John Couch Adams, whose ability to compute mathematically in his head was the stuff of Cambridge legend. This savant-like ability came with a tenacious reluctance to write anything down. This reluctance cost English astronomers the first opportunity to observe Neptune. Having deduced, from Uranus’ orbital irregularities, where a mystery planet should be found in the night sky, he failed to explain himself clearly to the astronomical bigwigs, who had little patience for the recent graduate. Roughly a year later, in 1846, the Frenchman Urbain Le Verrier managed to solve the problem and pointed his country’s own telescopes in the right direction. Adams was left with nothing but his incomplete written accounts and undated papers declaring his discovery, making establishing precedence impossible. Not that he seemed much bothered by losing out on the glory. He was personally very satisfied simply to have managed the computation.

Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet (1819-1903)

George Gabriel Stokes (of Navier-Stokes and Stokes’ Theorem) on the other hand, wrote compulsively, both mathematically and in personal correspondence (often to ease his own insecurities). Later in life he became editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, then the foremost journal in science, and this involved dealing with a huge amount of correspondence. Unfortunately he was a hoarder of papers of all and every kind, filling the rooms at his disposal with tables on which to pile up his papers. This was all compounded by his inclination towards procrastination

They might have made a formidable team, had their temperaments combined to negate the other’s weaknesses. Instead the project to deliver a verdict on the value of Newton’s papers and reveal his way of thinking was subject to great delay. Of the two however, it seems that Adams was the one who was most readily able to probe the documents deeply. Sarah Dry quotes Glaisher (Adam’s obituarist) as saying:

[…it was a] difficult and laborious task, extending over years, but once which intensely interested him, and upon which he spared no pains. In several instances he succeeded in tracing the methods that Newton must have used in order to obtain the numerical results which occurred in the papers. The solution of the enigmas presented by these numbers written on stray papers, without any clue to the source from which they were derived, was the kind of work in which all Adam’s skill, patience, and industry found full scope, and his enthusiasm for Newton was so great that he had no thought of time when so employed. His mind bore naturally a great resemblance to Newton’s in many marked respects, and he was so penetrated with Newton’s style of thought that he was peculiarly fitted to be his interpreter. Only a few intimate friends were aware of the immense amount of time he devoted to these manuscripts of the pleasure he derived from them.

John Glaisher — Memoir of the life of John Couch Adams

What Adams was doing, in his own manner, was nerding out. As with the discovery of Neptune, it seems that his motivations were overwhelmingly personal, and less in service to the scientific community. Imagine a referee today reading the paper under review very carefully, but forgetting to take notes and neglecting to get back to the editor. Nevertheless, conclusions were eventually drawn out of their little committee and a report of their findings was presented.

Here was confirmation that Newton had indeed worked by process of refinement that inevitably included false starts and error. In this sense, Newton revealed himself to be less an otherworldly genius and more a figure with whom the Cambridge wranglers could identify, a tireless worker in the mathematical trenches, where progress was made by increments rather than leaps. Adams knew the feeling well. In 1853 he had published an important paper pointing out errors made by Laplace in determining lunar motion and promising to provide the correct calculations soon; it had taken him six long years to get the final numbers. Here, in the papers, was evidence that Newton had worked just as hard to come up with his results.

The Newton Papers – Sarah Dry, pg 105

By the time I had finished my PhD I had produced a sizable pile of used dollar-store notebooks. Browsing through them I could recognize the contours of what I’d spent the past four years trying (and occasionally succeeding) to do. I might even have reconstructed from the pictures and computations I had written out what I might have actually been thinking at the time. And aside from myself, there are a few people in the world who could possibly make sense of their contents. It all went in the recycling. If somehow one of my notebooks did manage to survive, and made its way into the hands of future scholars, I would be alarmed to consider them giving the content more than cursory attention.

The hundreds (?) of pdfs that I have produced, now sitting out there in the cloud stand a far better chance at outliving me. And not just my published work and arxiv pre-prints (which number in the tens). But everything I ever committed to a latex document in my own personal space up there in the cyber heavens. Among all the discarded drafts that might find evidence of something interesting. Not only what I managed to do, but also what I failed to do. What I thought I had succeeded in doing, but had in fact betrayed my own good sense. When I have found mistakes, I am occasionally mindful enough to leave a short note in all-caps to make it clear where the point of failure lies. There is a great deal we can learn from knowing what other mathematicians have tried and failed to do.

Unlike physical notebooks, our cloud storage is password protected. Digital inheritance is already “a thing”, but it seems unclear to me how it will work out in practice. Kafka left his manuscripts in the possession of Max Brod with the instructions that they be destroyed in the event of his death. Brod told Kafka himself that he certainly wouldn’t, and indeed when Kafka died at the age of 40 as a consequence of tuberculosis, Brod set about getting Kafka’s work published. I haven’t taken a survey, but I would imagine that most young writers have made no attempt to ensure their passwords and unpublished estates are in suitable hands. In principal it is possible to submit a request to Google for access to the accounts of the deceased, but I can’t imagine there are any guarantees. I certainly have no idea what the terms and conditions that I have accepted have to say about such eventualities.

Newton died a man of wealth and importance. With neither wife nor children he had no direct descendants, but he did have a slew of half-nephews, half-nieces, and children of his half-sisters. The assets of obvious value were split between them. Those assets of less obvious value — the leftover pile of notebooks and “reams of loose and foul papers” fell into the possession of Catherine Conduitt. She was one of Newton’s half-nieces, and wife to John Conduitt, who had actively assisted Newton in his duties as master of the Royal Mint. This was the consequence of some rather wild tying-up of loose ends:

Newton had died while holding the post of master of the Mint, which in those days required that its holder assume personal responsibility for the probity of each new coinage of money. That meant that at Newton’s death he had nominal debts amounting to the entire sum of Great Britain’s national coinage. John Conduitt agreed to take on this debt until the coinage had been certified, accepting liability for any imperfections in the coins. In exchange for assuming this risk, he asked for, and was granted Newton’s manuscripts.

The Newton Papers – Sarah Dry, pg 15

The Conduitts took ownership of these papers with the view of producing a biography, and begin the work of securing Newton’s posthumous reputation. They became the first in a long line of people who had access to the papers, but lacked the tools really required to properly make sense of them. Their daughter, Kitty Conduitt married John Wallop who would become the Earl of Portsmouth, and papers would enter the library of Hurstbourne Park, seat of the Portsmouth family. (That is to say they fell into the possession of the aristocracy.) And it was there that they would remain, save occasional minor forays, and the recovery of the substantial portion of scientific papers by Stokes and Adams. What finally shifted the remaining papers out into the open was the fall of the English Aristocracy. In 1936, under the financial pressure of death duties and a recent divorce, Gerald Wallop, the ninth Earl of Portsmouth had the papers put up for auction at Sothebys.

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes (1883-1946)

If there is a hero in Dry’s account of the Newton Papers, it must be John Maynard Keynes. His heroic virtue being exceptional taste and judgement. Having begun collecting books as a child (possibly his first foray into speculation) he developed a rather prescient sense for what should be considered valuable. Unlike the majority of collectors he shared the marketplace with, Keynes was actually interested in reading the books themselves. He was less interested in the superficial qualities: illuminations, illustrations, binding, or an illustrious list of prior owners left him unmoved.

Keynes’s new style of collection was self-consciously intellectual, as opposed to aesthetic or literary. It asserted that a particular history of ideas or chain of thought linked certain men through the ages. And it projected the implicit assumption that its creator was an inheritor of both the material and the intellectual masterpieces of a previous age. Keynes was a thoroughgoing Bloomsburyite in his respect. The paintings on the wall, the rugs on the floor, the furnishing in the room, and the books on the shelves were never just things: they were the physical embodiment of ideas and values whose display was a source of both aesthetic pleasure and moral reinforcement. A book in the hand, like the good life in Bloomsbury of the Sussex countryside, linked the life of the mind with that of the physical world.

The Newton Papers – Sarah Dry, pg 147

You might already get the sense that Dry sees Keynes as simply bringing a new set of beliefs to the table, complete with their own set of limitations. Indeed, Keynes considerable contribution to our modern impression and understanding of Newton as half magician and half scientist, was really a very hot take based on an initial reading. He was the one who announced that the papers reveal Newton devoted great time and energy to the disreputable pursuits of alchemy and heretical theology. Yet the fact that so many of Newton’s papers have remained together and in the possession of the University of Cambridge can be attributed to his prescience sense of the papers’ importance.

Abraham Shalom Yahuda (on the right) (1877–1951)

Kaynes was only one of two major buyers at Sotheby’s. Abraham Yahuda, a scholar of ancient languages, bought most of Newton’s theological writings. Yahuda had found himself alienated from his own field of scholarship, due to recent developments in Higher Criticism applied to biblical scholarship. The Documentary Hypothesis was a shocking new line of textual analysis that argued the origins of the Torah were of combination and synthesis with earlier texts. As a consequence, these texts cease to resemble one coherent whole revealed to man, and begin to look more like artifacts of history and culture.

For Yahuda this was a vision of criticism taken to extremes, the text reduced to nothing but error, the possibility of meaning dissolving amid a multiplicity of authors, leaving only commentary, a Talmud with no Torah left in it. He thought in particular that too many sources were being attributed to the Pentateuch and that too many “experts” were exerting themselves “in the art of text alterations and source-hunting.” Thus “the original text was distorted and disfigured and in its place was offered a quite new text of pure invention.” In Newton, who himself sought to return a blemished Christianity to its purer origins, Yahuda found a kindred soul. Interpreting ancient texts didn’t require robbing them of fixed meaning. Both Newton and Yahuda sought instead to find a singular truth amid the variations.

The Newton papers – Sarah Dry, pg170

As a consequence of Yahuda’s desire to find an ally in Newton, those theological papers now reside in The National Library of Israel.

The final portion of Dry’s book concerns the subsequent attempts at synthesis of the material. The fact of the matter is that the task was simply impossible. There is too much material, covering too many subjects for any grand unifying conclusions to be drawn. It was hard to even put together a definitive edition of the Principia that covered all the different editions as well as Newton’s own marginalia. When finally published it was controversial due to the inevitable editorial decisions to include or not include certain material.

It is worth making one final point clear. I have never read Newtons’ Principia. I don’t believe you could find a research mathematician alive who has — unless their research happens to be the history of mathematics. It is a book whose significance is measured in its influence. Many decisions in its composition — in particular the modelling Newton’s Laws on the axioms in Euclid’s Elements — were very important. But you should not read it. When we discuss “great” books, there is usually the tacit understanding that we are missing out if we have not actually read the book. I am quite certain that we have not missed out.