A year or so ago I wrote the following on my own web site, in re the
intersection of math and politics. The point in my last paragraph is, I
believe, the important one:
Q. Do mathematicians as a whole have any political tendency?
A. Historically, I cannot see one. You can find great mathematicians of
all political persuasions. Cauchy was an extreme reactionary, Galois a
radical, and so on. There are two mathematicians in my book who were
sincere Nazis: Bieberbach and Teichmüller. Neither was of the first rank,
but both were much better mathematicians that you (almost certainly) or me
(indubitably).
From hanging around with mathematicians while working on Prime Obsession,
I should guess that an American mathematician in our own time is more likely
to vote Democrat than Republican. That, however, is true of academics in
general. A liberal would argue that this demonstrates the superior
intellectual content of Democratic policies; a conservative would argue that
it demonstrates the ivory-tower nature of those policies — the fact that
they have as little application to everyday life as, well, analytic number
theory.
The most general statement I am willing to make in this area is the
following: If you are going to do mathematics at the highest level, you
will not have much time or brain-power left to think about anything else in
a serious way.
If I am right about that, one would expect that the principal characteristic
of the politics of professional mathematicians would be un-seriousness.
Either a mathematician will, like Riemann, never bother to question the
political ideas he heard in his childhood home; or else, if he develops
strong political opinions of his own, those opinions are likely to be wacky
and extreme. The ease with which confirming examples of the latter type
spring to mind suggests to me that I am on to something here. Look at the
glimpse of Hardy’s politics I give in Chapter 14.iii of Prime Obsession,
for instance. Bieberbach and Teichmüller can be mentioned again in this
context, too. And let us not forget that Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber,
holds a Ph.D. in math from the University of Michigan, and taught math at
Berkeley…