Authority: When we are stuck we look beyond ourselves. Authority is the common topic that forces us to see our limitations and seek help from those who have come before.
“The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.”
Blaise Pascal.
When faced with a problem, mathematics or otherwise, one of our greatest mistakes is to think that we must solve it alone. We are created and called to live in community and as the famous mathematician Pascal reminds us, the more we know, the more we know that men are unique. When do we seek outside help in the form of an authority in mathematics?
In every problem that we encounter in a mathematics text we are challenged to grow as students of mathematics. The text itself, written by a group of mathematicians, calls us to enter into the community of thinkers. The entire process of learning with a textbook is appealing to authority. Without this authority on our mathematics education, we would stumble along seeking the truth and creator like the ancient Greeks. Would we still discover truths about God? Yes. As the Greeks discovered the relationships in triangles expressed in the Pythagorean Theorem, we would also discover these truths. However, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. It is enough for us to be given the truths by the great minds that came before us, apply the truths in practice, and understand the truths by walking through the proofs. By standing on the shoulders of the mathematical giants that have gone before us we are able to discover new truths. We learn new things that man was not able to encounter in the past because at long last man is faced with mortality and learns that while God is infinite, man is not.