ABSTRACT
In the book that Bemhelm and I sketched out orally and in many subsequent e-letters, we fantasized that the Ghost of Thomas Jefferson had asked us to bring him up to date with respect to mathematics; to tell him what mathematics has accomplished in the two and a half centuries since he studied Hutton’s popular Course of Mathematics or browsed in Laplace; to tell him how and in what ways it has molded the physical and the mental world of the twentieth century; what are its prospects for the twenty-first; whether it has contributed to his ardent hope that the forward movement of science is linked to the notion of freedom, and whether it has been instrumental in throwing off despotisms.
