Denny Burzynski
BA & MA in Mathematics
California State University,
Long Beach
CSN Mathematics Department
Instructor since 2011
This is a
toothpaste I never use.

With some of my friends, I
have authored a few mathematics textbooks.





I
like the thoughts of Morris Kline. Morris
Kline, one of the twentieth centuryÕs great mathematicians, in his book, A
History of Mathematics in Western Culture, advances the thesisÉ that
mathematics has been a major cultural force in Western civilization. Almost
everyone knows that mathematics serves the very practical purpose of dictating
engineering design.
Fewer people seem to
be aware that mathematics carries the main burden of scientific reasoning and
is the core of the major theories of physical science. It is even less widely
known that mathematics has determined the direction and content of much
philosophic thought, has destroyed and rebuilt religious doctrines, has
supplied substance to economic and political theories, has fashioned major
painting, musical, architectural, and literary styles, has fathered our logic,
and has furnished the best answers we have to the fundamental questions about
the nature of man and his universe.
As
the embodiment and most powerful advocate of the rational spirit, mathematics
has invaded domains ruled by authority, custom, and habit, and has supplanted
them as the arbiter of thought and action. Finally, as an incomparably fine
human achievement, mathematics offers satisfactions and aesthetic values at
least equal to those offered by any other branches of our culture.
Bertrand
Russell, the English philosopher, states:
ÒMathematics,
rightly viewed, possesses É supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere,
like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature,
without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and
capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true
spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than a man, which is
the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as
surely as in poetry.Ó