I was walking past the MIT building yesterday, and I read the names inscribed on the MIT Math building. If you are facing the Dome and look right at the Math bu

I was walking past the MIT building yesterday, and I read the names inscribed on the MIT Math building. If you are facing the Dome and look right at the Math building you see in huge letters Newton, and in smaller letters Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler and some others. This makes sense, the starting point of modern mathematics is Newton, and it's quite likely that the giants on whose shoulders he stood were Brahe, Galileo and Kepler. If you read from the river side, you see in huge letters Aristotle and in smaller letters some ancient Greeks, like Euclid. But if you read the inscribed names to the left of Newton, the name in huge letters is ... Franklin. This to me was a surprise, but then also a pleasant surprise. It was an admission/recognition that the science of democracy has equal standing with mathematics. If anything, democracy is more difficult to tame than math, because there will always be people trying to hijack a system, and exploit all the loopholes they can identify, while the roots of the zeta function will stay in the same place forever, they will not adapt to the way you try to chase them.