Re: [HM] historians repeat each other (was: History of Mathematics: to whom?)
Peter Schreiber (schreibe@mail.uni-greifswald.de)
Tue, 14 Dec 1999 13:29:09 MET
"History repeats itself, historians repeat each other" is a very nice
aphorism but in fact it is false. There are situations and events in
history, very similar to other ones, but never congruent. So, mathe-
matically spoken, history is not a periodic function but something like
the Mandelbrot set, with many sights and always new surprises. Histo-
rians also in general do not repeat others, because each age has new
questions about history, questions arising from actual problems, which
were impossible to formulate one or two generations before. So, from
my point of view, the difficulty is not to find new facts and new
sights, but what to delete from older histories. Is it permitted to
forget anything, not relevant for us? Perhaps, in the future it may
become interesting anew.
Peter Schreiber