Unfashionable Pursuits*

Freeman J. Dyson

Introduction finally I shall say a few words suggesting how we may

I am delighted to be talking today as a representative
of the Institute for Advanced Study to an audience of
Humboldt Foundation alumni, since the Institute and
the Foundation are both trying to support science on
an international scale and are facing similar dilemmas
and difficulties. We are both trying to carry on the
tradition established by Alexander von Humboldt 150
years ago. Wanting to learn a little about von Hum-
boldt, I went to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, printed in 1910, and found a splendid article
written by the historian of science Agnes Clerke. If you
go to later editions, you find Clerke's account only in
shreds and tatters. In her article she describes the work
of von Humboldt in setting up the first international
network of meteorological and magnetic observation
stations and concludes with this resounding sentence:
"Thus that scientific conspiracy of nations which is one
of the noblest fruits of modern civilization was by his
exertions first successfully organized." So that is what
we are trying to do, the Institute and the Foundation,
following the good example of von Humboldt. We are
trying to strengthen and extend in our own era the
scientific conspiracy of nations.
try to deal more wisely with the problem in the future.
It has always been true, a n d it is true now more than
ever, that the path of wisdom for a young scientist of
mediocre talent is to follow the prevailing fashion. Any
young scientist who is not exceptionally gifted or ex-
ceptionally lucky is concerned first of all with finding
and keeping a job. To find and keep a job you have to
do competent work in an area of science which the
mandarins who control the job market find interesting.
The scientific problems which the mandarins find in-
teresting are, almost by definition, the fashionable
problems. Nowadays the award of jobs is usually con-
trolled not by a single mandarin but by a committee
of mandarins. A committee is even less likely than an
individual to break loose from the fashionable trends
of the day. It is no wonder that young scientists who
care for their own survival tend to keep dose to the
beaten paths. The leading institutions of h i g h e r
learning offer security and advancement to those who
Freeman J. Dyson

Fashions in Science

I decided to speak about the problem of fashions in

science, since this is a problem of serious and growing
importance for science generally and for the Institute
and the H u m b o l d t Foundation in particular. I shall
speak first about the problem of fashion as we see it
here at the Institute, then about lessons we may learn
from the history of science on a longer time scale, and

*This talk was delivered to the Alexandervon Humboldt Foun-

dation Bi-NationalColloquiumfor Humboldt Awardees in cooper-
ation with the Institutefor AdvancedStudyat Princeton,New Jersey,
on August 24, 1981. The talk was subsequentlypublished by Alex-
ander von Humboldt-Stiftungin the Proceedingsof that conference
and also in the Mitteilungen (January 1983, No. 41). The Intelligencer
wishes to thank the author and Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung
for their permission to reprint this artide.

THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER VOL. 5, NO. 3 9 1983 Springer-Verlag New York 47

It has always been true, and it is true
now more than ever, that the path of
wisdom for a young scientist of mediocre
talent is to follow the prevailing fashion.
skillfully follow the fashion, and only a slim chance to
those who do not.
Our Institute here is no exception. When I first came
here as a visiting member 34 years ago, the ruling man-
darin was Robert Oppenheimer. O p p e n h e i m e r de-
cided which areas of physics were worth pursuing. His
tastes always coincided with the most recent fashions.
Being then y o u n g and ambitious, I came to him with
a quick piece of work dealing w i t h a fashionable
problem and was duly rewarded with a permanent
appointment. That is the way it was at the Institute
then, and that is the way it still is now. Somebody
who knows the history of the Institute may object at
this point, saying that, after all, the Institute also gave
a permanent appointment to Kurt G6del. That is true.
G6del was one of the few indubitable geniuses of our
century, the only one of our colleagues who walked
and talked on equal terms with Einstein. G6del worked
in profoundly unfashionable areas of mathematics and
became even more unfashionable as he grew older.
Our Institute can justly be proud of having made room
for him on its faculty. There is only one fact which
must temper our pride. It took the Institute 14 years
to make G6del a Professor, measured from the year he
came to live and work here as an ordinary member.
G6del was such an independent and recalcitrant spirit
that I suppose we deserve some credit for making him
a professor at all, even after 14 years of hesitation.
Better late than never.
The young physicists who come to the Institute as
members today are under much stronger pressure than
I was 30 years ago. To begin with, they mostly come
with money from government contracts which legally
oblige them to work in a definite area of science for a
definite length of time. Of course we do not take the
The scientific problems which the mandarins
find interesting are, almost by definition,
the fashionable problems.
wording of the contracts too literally. The officials of
the National Science Foundation and the Department
of Energy who administer the contracts are reasonable
people and allow us to interpret our obligations with
some flexibility. If some of our members on contract
money decide to work in areas which have nothing to
do with the contracts, we are not obliged to turn them
out onto the street. People whose interests do not fit
48 THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER VOL. 5, NO. 3, 1983
Kurt GOdel
into the contracts can usually be supported with In-
stitute funds. But still, the contracts are a serious con-
straint. The contracts define in a general way the areas
of work within which the visiting members of the
physics school at the Institute will be active. The con-
tracts define where the mainstream of physics is sup-
posed to be. And inevitably the people we invite to
come here as members tend to be people whose work
fits smoothly into one or another of the contracts.
I am now, after 30 years, one of the mandarins. I try
in a vague and feeble way to encourage young phys-
icists to work outside the fashionable areas. I try to
keep alive a few areas of research which are not sup-
ported by contracts. I try to keep this institute open to
independent and recalcitrant spirits. I try to keep a
door open here in case another Kurt G6del should one
day come knocking. But I have to admit that m y efforts
to hold back the tide of fashion are about as effective
as the efforts of my illustrious predecessor King Canute
to hold back the tide of the Atlantic Ocean. The young
people are compelled nowadays to follow the fashion
by forces stronger than the wording of contracts and
the authority of mandarins. The forces which drive the
y o u n g people toward fashionable pursuits are peer
pressure and the excitement of the chase itself. They
know where the action is, and they want to be part of
it. They know that they have only a short time to prove
themselves as scientists. They know that their best
chance of achieving something worthwhile in the short
span of time allotted to them is to go with the crowd,
to grab the scientific fruit quickly where it is ripe for
picking.
The running of young scientists after quick success
and quick rewards is not in itself bad. The concentra-
tion of their efforts into narrow areas of fashionable
speciahzation is not necessarily harmful. After all, the
fashionable problems become fashionable not by the
whim of some dress designer but because a substantial
majority of scientists judges them to be important. As
a general rule, the judgment of the majority is well
founded. The fashionable areas are often those in which
crucially important discoveries are made. There is
nothing wrong in a young scientist rushing into these
areas in the hope of making a sensational discovery.
Indeed, the joy and excitement of daily life at the In-
stitute are greatly enhanced by the gregarious nature
of research in the fashionable areas. When you are
exploring in a fashionable area, every petty success
and every e p h e m e r a l triumph can be shared with
friends at the lunch table or the seminar. Without this
communal interest in fashionable problems, without
this sharing of news and rumors, our life here would
be much the poorer.
Why then am I dissatisfied? Why am I grumbling at
the young people for doing what I myself did when I
was their age? I am grumbling because I do not think
the fashionable stuff ought to be a hundred percent of
what we do here. The fashionable stuff is useful and
important and exciting. We can be p r o u d that our
young people do the fashionable stuff and do it well.
We can expect that a majority of them will always prefer
to do the fashionable stuff, for reasons which I under-
stand and respect. I am only saying that we ought to
have room here also for a minority w h o do not do the
fashionable stuff. We ought to seek out and encourage
the rare individualists w h o do not fit into the pre-
vailing pattern. We ought to bias our admission of
members a little towards unorthodox and unconven-
tional spirits. If we here do not give the practitioners
of unfashionable science a home and a place to work,
who will?
Ancient History
There are many kinds of unfashionable science. One
of the main difficulties of supporting it is the problem
of selection. Unfashionable science comes in a thou-
sand different shapes without any unifying structure.
Let me give y o u an example. Last week I was walking
across the Forrestal Campus of Princeton University
and came upon two graduate students sitting quietly
in the middle of a field. I thought at first they were
just enjoying the sunshine and the silence of an Au-
gust afternoon, but w h e n I came closer I saw that they
were working with intense concentration, performing
some delicate manipulations which required steady
hands and f r e e d o m from distracting interruptions.
Coming closer still, I saw that they were busily gluing
little lead weights to the backs of honeybees. I watched
in silence until they were finished, then walked with
them back to their experimental hive which is equipped
with cameras and videotape recorders. They are re-
fining and extending the classic experiments of Karl
von Frisch on the dance communication system of bees.
They have found that bees dance more vigorously and
We ought to seek out and encourage the rare
individualists who do not fit into the
prevailing pattern.
more accurately when they have found a source of
honey at a considerable distance from the hive. Un-
fortunately, the majority of bees find honey close to
the hive and make only a brief and perfunctory dance
when they return. The students want to observe the
dance with high accuracy, so they have found a w a y
to trick the bees into dancing more vigorously. A bee
weighed down with 45 milligrams of lead thinks she
has made a long flight w h e n she actually made a short
one. She measures the length of a flight by the effort
it costs her to fly. So the bees which carry weights
dance accurately after every find.
That is a typical example of unfashionable science,
being done right here on our doorstep in Princeton. I
am not suggesting that the Institute for Advanced Study
ought to support a school of entomology. But the ex-
ample of the bee experiments shows all the character-
istic features that make unfashionable science difficult
to support: small scale, diversity of objectives, idio-
syncratic style, and a certain lack of superficial seri-
ousness.
To make clear the real and lasting importance of un-
fashionable science, I return to the field in which I am
expert, namely, mathematical physics. Mathematical
physics is the discipline of people who try to reach a
deep u n d e r s t a n d i n g of physical p h e n o m e n a b y fol-
lowing the rigorous style and method of pure mathe-
matics. It is a discipline which lies on the border be-
tween physics and mathematics. The purpose of the
mathematical physicists is not to calculate phenomena
quantitatively but to u n d e r s t a n d them qualitatively.
They work with theorems and proofs, not with num-
bers and computers. Their aim is to clarify with math-
Unfashionable science comes in a thousand
different shapes without any unifying
structure.
ematical precision the meaning of the concepts upon
which physical theories are built.
Mathematical physics has three qualities which make
it peculiarly relevant to the present discussion. First,
it is important in the larger scheme of things, sup-
THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER VOL. 5, NO. 3, 1983 49
plying basic ideas and vocabulary to the more prac-
tical areas of physics. Second, it is slow, taking typi-
cally 50 or 100 years to develop a n e w concept from
its origin to its fruitful application. Third, it is almost
always unfashionable, since its rhythms run about 10
times slower than the rhythms of scientific fashion.
And because it is unfashionable, it has always been
more highly regarded and better supported in Europe
than in the United States.
As an example of a great mathematical physicist
whose work is of crucial importance to the develop-
ment of physics at the present time, I mention the
name of Sophus Lie. Lie has been dead for 80 years.
His great work was done in the 1870s and 1880s, but
it has come to dominate the thinking of particle phys-
icists only in the last 20 years. Lie was the first to
understand and state explicitly that the principles of
physics have a group-theoretical origin. He con-
structed almost single-handed a vast and beautiful
theory of continuous groups, which he foresaw would
one day serve as a foundation of physics. Now, 100
years later, every physicist who classifies particles in
terms of broken and unbroken symmetries is, whether
he is aware of it or not, talking the language of Sophus
Lie. But in his lifetime Lie's ideas remained unfashion-
able, little understood by mathematicians and not at
all by physicists. Felix Klein was one of the few leading
mathematicians w h o understood and supported him.
Lie was one of those people who seem to have more
than their fair share of bad luck. He was wandering
around France as a young man when the Franco-Prus-
sian war of 1870 broke out. He was Norwegian and
spoke French with what sounded like a Prussian ac-
Sophus Lie
50 THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER VOL. 5, NO. 3, 1983
cent. So the patriotic citizens of Fontainebleau decided
he was a Prussian spy and threw him into jail. Mean-
while, France lost the war and conditions became gen-
erally chaotic. Lie was sitting quietly in his cell, working
out his new mathematical discoveries, when his French
friends finally found out where he was and succeeded
in getting him released (Lie, 1877). In Rouse Ball's his-
tory of mathematics, published around the turn of the
century, the account of Lie's work ends on a melan-
choly note (Rouse Ball, 1908): "Lie seems to have been
disappointed and soured by the absence of any general
recognition of the value of his results . . . . He brooded
over what he deemed was the undue neglect of the
past, and the happiness of the last decade of his life
was much affected by it."
Another great genius of mathematical physics, even
more unfashionable in his o w n day than Sophus Lie,
was Hermann Grassmann. As a gymnasium teacher
in Stettin he published in 1844 a work entitled Die Lin-
eale Ausdehnungslehre (The Calculus of Extension), in-
troducing for the first time the basic notions of a vector,
of a vector space, and of an anticommuting algebra.
All these notions have been of central importance for
the physics of the twentieth century, but not of the
nineteenth. In his own century, Grassmann remained
an obscure gymnasium teacher in Stettin, ignored by
the academic mandarins of his time. But he had a
greater resiliency of spirit than Sophus Lie. Instead of
brooding like Lie over his lack of recognition among
the mathematicians, Grassmann started a second ca-
reer as a student of Sanskrit and achieved a modest
fame as translator of the Rig-Veda into German. Per-
haps, if it is your fate to be an unrecognized mathe-
Hermann Grassmann
matical genius, it is better for your health to earn a
living as a gymnasium teacher rather than to be a uni-
versity professor.
While preparing m y remarks for this meeting I went
to the Institute library and was happy to find there a
copy of the 1878 edition of the Ausdehnungslehrewith
the name of Minkowski, teacher of Einstein and first
among mathematicians to understand relativity, written
on the front page in pencil. The 1878 edition has a
preface by Grassmann, still writing from Stettin and
cheerfully expressing the hope that the n e w edition
will receive more attention from the learned world than
the first edition had 34 years earlier. At the end of the
preface is a footnote saying, "Der Verfasser ist w/ih-
rend des Druckes gestorben" (The author died while
this book was in press). It was only in the 1890s that
Felix Klein, always generous in fighting for unfashion-
able causes, organized the official recognition of Grass-
mann and the publication of his collected w o r k s
(Grassmann, 1844, 1878, 1894).
A more recent example of a great discovery in math-
ematical physics w a s the idea of a gauge field, in-
vented by Hermann Weyl in 1918. This idea has taken
only 50 years to find its place as one of the basic con-
cepts of modern particle physics. Q u a n t u m chromo-
dynamics, the most fashionable theory of particle phy-
sicists in 1981, is conceptually little more than a syn-
thesis of Lie's group algebras and Weyl's gauge fields.
The history of Weyl's discovery is quite unlike the his-
tory of Lie groups and Grassmann algebras. Weyl was
neither obscure nor unrecognized, and he was working
in 1918 in the most fashionable area of physics, the
n e w b o r n theory of general relativity. He invented
Hermann Weyl
gauge fields as a solution to the fashionable problem
of unifying gravitation with electromagnetism. For a
few months gauge fields were at the height of fashion.
Then it was discovered by WeyI and others that they
did not do what was expected of them. Gauge fields
were in fact no good for the purpose for which Weyl
invented them. They quickly became unfashionable and
But in his lifetime Lie's ideas remained
unfashionable, little understood by math-
ematicians and not at all by physicists.
were almost forgotten. But then, very gradually over
the next 50 years, it became clear that gauge fields
were important in a quite different context, in the
theory of quantum electrodynamics and its extensions
leading u p to the recent d e v e l o p m e n t of q u a n t u m
chromodynamics. The decisive step in the rehabilita-
tion of gauge fields was taken by our Princeton col-
league, Frank Yang, and one of his students, Bob Mills,
in 1954, one year before Hermann Weyl's death (Yang
and Mills, 1954). There is no evidence that Weyl ever
knew or cared what Yang and Mills had done with his
brain child.
So the story of gauge fields is full of ironies. A fash-
ionable idea, invented for a purpose which turns out
to be ephemeral, survives a long period of obscurity
and emerges finally as a cornerstone of physics. Such
ironies are not unusual in the long history of mathe-
matical physics. Hamilton's invention of quaternions,
hailed as a panacea for the problems of nineteenth-
century physics, was discarded as useless at the turn
of the century, rejuvenated in the form of spin ma-
trices in the quantum mechanics of the 1920s, and has
now ascended in glory to the quark field theories of
the 1980s. Gauss's invention of differential geometry,
originating as a by-product of his work on the practical
p r o b l e m s of g e o d e s y and m a p making, w a s trans-
formed into a new world of abstract generality by the
genius of Riemann, emerging 50 years later as the con-
ceptual basis of Einstein's theory of gravitation.
Common to all these histories are the long time scale,
Gauge fields were in fact no good for the
purpose for which Weyl invented them.
usually longer than a h u m a n lifetime from start to
finish, and the totally unpredictable quality of the final
outcome. In no case did the inventor of the crucial
concept have the slightest inkling of the physical con-
text in which his invention would find its ultimate frui-
tion.
That is enough about the past. I think I have given
THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER VOL. 5, NO. 3, 1983 51
you enough historical examples to prove my point,
that unfashionable people and unfashionable ideas
have often been of decisive importance to the progress
of science. The time has n o w come to talk about the
present and the future. I see no reason to expect that
the pattern of development of scientific ideas in the
future will be different from what it has been in the
past. We must expect unfashionable ideas to emerge
into importance as frequently in the future as they have
done in the past, usually after long periods of gestation
and in unfamiliar contexts. The problems which we
face as guardians of scientific progress are then: how
to recognize the fruitful unfashionable idea, and how
to support it.
The Monster and the Moral
To begin with, we may look around at the world of
mathematics and see whether we can identify unfash-
ionable ideas which might later emerge as essential
building blocks for the physics of the twenty-first cen-
tury. If we are lucky, we may find some good candi-
dates for future prominence. Of course we cannot ex-
pect to know in our lifetimes whether we picked the
right ones.
Roughly speaking, unfashionable mathematics con-
sists of those parts of mathematics which were de-
dared by the mandarins of Bourbaki not to be math-
ematics. A number of very beautiful mathematical dis-
coveries fall into this category. To be mathematics
according to Bourbaki, an idea should be general, ab-
stract, coherent, and connected by clear logical rela-
tionships with the rest of mathematics. Excluded from
We must expect unfashionable ideas to
emerge into importance as frequently in the
future as they have done in the past, usually
after long periods of gestation and in
unfamiliar contexts.
mathematics are particular facts, concrete objects which
just happen to exist for no identifiable reason, things
which a mathematician would call accidental or spo-
radic. Unfashionable mathematics is mainly concerned
with things of accidental beauty, special functions,
particular n u m b e r fields, exceptional algebras, spo-
radic finite groups. It is among these unorganized and
undisciplined parts of mathematics that I would advise
you to look for the next revolution in physics. They
have a quality of strangeness, of unexpectedness. They
do not fit easily into the smooth logical structures of
Bourbaki. Just for that reason we should cherish and
cultivate them, remembering the w o r d s of Francis
Bacon which our director Harry Woolf used as theme
52 THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER VOL. 5, NO. 3, 1983
song of the Institute's Einstein Centennial celebration
two years ago: "There is no excellent beauty that hath
not some strangeness in the proportion" (Woolf, 1980).
As an example of strangeness in the proportion, I
will speak briefly about sporadic finite groups (Conway,
Roughly speaking, unfashionable
mathematics consists of those parts of
mathematics which were declared by the
mandarins of Bourbaki not to be
mathematics.
1980). Their history begins with the French mathe-
matician Emile Mathieu, w h o discovered the first of
them in the year 1861 and the second in 1873. Mathieu,
as is usual in such cases, did not know that he had
invented sporadic groups. In fact the word "group"
does not appear in the titles of his papers (Mathieu,
1861, 1873). But he knew very well that he had found
something beautiful and important. Using the lan-
guage of geometry, we may say that he had found that
there exist in spaces of 12 and 24 dimensions structures
of a peculiar symmetry which do not occur in spaces
with any number of dimensions different from 12 or
24. His work was published, but remained for 100 years
unfashionable. It was, as orthodox mathematicians like
to say, an isolated curiosity, not leading anywhere.
About 75 years later the Mathieu groups turned out
to be of some practical importance in the business of
code making. Each Mathieu group forms the basis for
the design of a uniquely efficient error-correcting code.
This m u n d a n e utility of the Mathieu g r o u p s did
nothing, of course, to raise their status in the eyes of
mathematicians whose tastes were formed by Bour-
baki.
Then rather suddenly, in the last 20 years, a mag-
nificent zoo of new sporadic groups was discovered
by a variety of mathematicians working with a variety
of methods. Some of them were discovered by fol-
lowing the ideas of Mathieu, others by studying the
peculiarly unfashionable problem of packing 24-di-
mensional billiard-balls as tightly as possible into a 24-
dimensional Euclidean space (Leech, 1967), others by
testing permutations and combinations with big com-
puters.
The only thing these various discoveries had in
common was a concrete, empirical, experimental, ac-
cidental quality, directly antithetical to the spirit of
Bourbaki. Altogether 25 sporadic groups, including
those of Mathieu, were discovered. Meanwhile the fra-
ternity of professional group-theorists, using more
general and abstract methods, succeeded in proving
that the total number of sporadic groups could not be
larger than 26. So we reached the situation two years
ago that only one more sporadic group remained to be
found. It was k n o w n that this last group, if it existed,
would be the biggest and most beautiful of all (Conway
and Norton, 1979). It was given the nicknames
"Monster" and "Friendly Giant" by the people who
were hunting for it.
The end of the story came last year w h e n Bob Griess,
visiting here at the Institute from the University of
Michigan, f o u n d the w a y to construct the Monster
(Griess, 1981). Just yesterday I received from Mich-
igan the final installment of a long paper containing a
complete and definitive account of his work (Griess,
1982). The Monster is now revealed in all its glory to
So far as we know, the physical universe
would look and function just as it does,
whether or not the sporadic groups existed.
those who take the trouble to understand the details
of Bob Griess's construction. The last and greatest of
the sporadic groups, it n o w stands forever, unique and
unassailable, a monument more durable than bronze.
What has all this to do with physics? Probably
nothing. Probably the sporadic groups are merely a
pleasant backwater in the history of mathematics, an
odd little episode far from the mainstream of progress.
We have never seen the slightest hint that the sym-
metries of the physical universe are in any way con-
nected with the symmetries of the sporadic groups. So
far as we know, the physical universe would look and
function just as it does whether or not the sporadic
groups existed. But we should not be too sure that
there is no connection. Absence of evidence is not the
same thing as evidence of absence. Stranger things
have happened in the history of physics than the un-
expected appearance of sporadic groups. We should
always be prepared for surprises. I have to confess to
you that I have a sneaking hope, a hope unsupported
by any facts or any evidence, that sometime in the
twenty-first century physicists will stumble upon the
monster group, build in some unsuspected way into
the structure of the universe. This is of course only a
wild speculation, almost certainly wrong. The only ar-
Wherever you look in the realm of ideas,
you find hints of revelations still to
come, whispers of hidden connections.
gument I can produce in its favor is a theological one.
We have strong evidence that the creator of the uni-
verse loves symmetry, and if he loves symmetry, what
lovelier symmetry could he find than the symmetry of
the Monster?
The sporadic groups are only one example from the
treasure house of weird and wonderful concepts which
unfashionable mathematicians have created. I could
mention many others. Can you imagine a regular poly-
hedron, a body composed of perfectly symmetrical cells
arranged in a perfectly symmetrical structure, having
a total of 11 faces? Last year my friend Donald Coxeter
in Toronto discovered it (Coxeter, 1981). Is it possible
that the zeros of the zeta-function, whose properties
were conjectured by Riemann 120 years ago and still
remain one of the central mysteries of mathematics,
will turn out to have hidden connections with the world
of physics? Last year Andrew Odlyzko, a mathemati-
cian at Bell Laboratories working with a Cray com-
puter, found some new and unexpected properties of
zeta-function zeros. Is it possible that the incomplete-
ness theorems of Kurt GOdel, proving that there are
questions in pure mathematics which any given finite
set of axioms and rules of inference are unable to an-
swer, will one day give us a deeper understanding of
the limitations of our knowledge of the physical uni-
verse? Wherever you look in the realm of ideas, you
find hints of revelations still to come, whispers of
hidden connections.
We ought to give greater attention and
greater support to unfashionable research.
At any particular moment in the history of
science, the most important and fruitful
ideas are often lying dormant merely
because they are unfashionable:
But n o w my time is almost up, and I must keep my
promise to give you some practical advice about the
support of science. I am saying, both to the Institute
for Advanced Study and to the Humboldt Foundation,
that is is our duty and our privilege as independent
organizations to be less short-sighted than our govern-
ments. Our role should be to take a longer view of
science than either politicians or postdoctoral students
can afford. What does the longer view of science teach
us? What is the moral to be drawn from the various
stories that I have told you? The moral is a simple one.
We ought to give greater attention and greater support
to unfashionable research. At any particular moment
in the history of science, the most important and fruitful
ideas are often lying dormant merely because they are
unfashionable. Especially in mathematical physics,
there is commonly a lag of 50 or 100 years between
the conception of a new idea and its emergence into
the mainstream of scientific thought. If this is the time
scale of fundamental advance, it necessarily follows
that anybody doing fundamental work in mathemat-
ical physics is almost certain to be unfashionable.
We should not, of course, stop supporting the fash-
ionable research which keeps most of our young sci-
entists busy and happy. But we should set aside a
THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER VOL. 5, NO. 3, 1983 53
certain fraction of our resources, perhaps a tenth or
perhaps a quarter, for the support of unfashionable
people doing unfashionable things. We should not be
afraid of looking foolish or even crazy. We should not
be afraid of s u p p o r t i n g risky ventures which m a y fail
totally. Since we are independent, we have the right
to take risks a n d to m a k e mistakes. Organizations
which only s u p p o r t research where there is no risk and
no chance of mistakes will in the e n d support only
mediocrity. If we proceed with good sense and courage
to support unfashionable people doing things that or-
thodox opinion considers irrelevant or crazy, there is
a good chance that we shall rescue for science an oc-
casional Sophus Lie or H e r m a n n Grassmann, people
whose ideas will still be famous long after all our con-
temporary fashionable excitements are forgotten.
References
Conway, J. H. (1980) Monsters and Moonshine, The Math-
ematical Intelligencer, 2, No. 4, 165-171
Conway, J. H. and S. P. Norton (1979) Monstrous Moon-
shine, Bull. London Math. Soc. 11, 308-339
Coxeter, H. S. M. (1981) "A Symmetrical Arrangement of
Eleven Hemi-Icosahedra," to be published
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THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER VOL. 5, NO. 3, I983
Grassmann, H. (1844, 1878, 1894) Die Lineale Ausdehnung-
slehre, 1st ed. (Otto Wigand, Leipzig) 1844, 2nd ed. (Otto
Wigand, Leipzig) 1878, 3rd ed. in Grassmann's collected
works edited by F. Engel (Teubner, Leipzig) 1894
Griess, R. L. (1981) A Construction of F1 as Automorphisms
of a 196883-dimensional Algebra, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci.
USA, 78, 689-691
Griess, R. L. (1982) The Friendly Giant, Invent. Math. 69, 1-
102
Leech, J. (1967) Notes on Sphere Packings, Can J. Math. 19,
251-267
Lie, S. (1877) Letter to A. Mayer, published in Sophus Lie,
Gesammelte Abhandlungen, ed. F. Engel (Leipzig,
Teubner, 1922), Vol. 3, Anmerkungen, p. 691
Mathieu, E. L. (1861, 1873) M~moire sur l'6tude des fonc-
t-ions de plusieurs quantit6s, J. de Math. Pures et Ap-
pliqu6es, 6, 241-323, "Sur la fonction cinq fois transitive
de 24 quantit6s," J. de Math. Pures et Appliqu6es, 18,
25--46
Rouse, Ball, W. W. (1908) A Short Account of the History of
Mathematics, 4th ed. (MacMillan, London), p. 478
Woolf, H., ed. (1980) Some Strangeness in the Proportion:
A Centennial Symposium to Celebrate the Achieve-
ments of Albert Einstein (Addison-Wesley, Reading,
Mass.)
Yang, C. N. and R. L. Mills (1954) Conservation of Isotopic
Spin and Isotopic Gauge Invariance, Phys. Rev. 96,
191-195
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