My Thoughts
There is a short story—are these written anymore—by Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, The Purloined Letter.[1] One of the characters, C. Auguste Dupin, in the brief narrative lays claim that the suspected purloiner of a letter which contained damaging and sensitive information which was being used as blackmail was both poet and mathematician and that as such he would reason well; “as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all, …” The narrator of the tale, thus responds, “You surprise me by these opinions, which have been contradicted by the voice of the world. You do not mean to set at naught the well-digested idea of centuries. The mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence.”