Chapter 3: New Winds Blowing in Applied Mathematics

How would you complete this sentence: “This is The Age of …” ?

Every generation of writers has filled in the dots not only for their own age, but for selected past ages. In 1947, the poet W. H. Auden wrote that his was “The Age of Anxiety.” Around 1970, song writers, pulling on astrological beliefs, were cheerful (and whistling in the dark) called it “The Age of Aquarius,” an age of love and human kindness. More recently, psychiatrist Daniel Freeman wrote that this is the “Age of Paranoia” with distrust and optical surveillance everywhere. We answer according to our experiences.