In Erdös idiosyncratic nomenclature, all the best proofs are "in the book" and it was always a joyful thing to not only find a proof, but to find the proof that is in the book.
Who cares if it is God's book or the machine's Xeroxed copy?
In Erdös idiosyncratic nomenclature, all the best proofs are "in the book" and it was always a joyful thing to not only find a proof, but to find the proof that is in the book.
Who cares if it is God's book or the machine's Xeroxed copy?
Long before Erdös, we had Plato and Socrates develop the theory of anamnesis, that there is no such thing as learning, but rather, whatever we supposedly learn, we actually remember (we knew it already and had forgotten it). Presumably this should be understood only of universal facts (like mathematics), not contingent facts (like who was the president of the U.S. in 1950).