Do mathematicians have responsibilities?

Abstract

I have been an admirer of Reuben Hersh ever since I received a copy of The Mathematical Experience, then brand new, as a birthday present. At that stage, of course, I was admiring the tandem Reuben formed then, and on other occasions, with his coauthor Philip J. Davis. It was only almost 20 years later, after I started reading What is Mathematics, Really?, that I could focus my admiration on Reuben-and not only on the mathematician, the author, and the thinker about mathematics but on the person Reuben Hersh-the unmistakable and unforgettable voice that accompanies the reader from the beginning to the end of the book. So unforgettable was the voice, in fact, that when Reuben wrote to me out of the blue three years ago to ask me what I thought about a certain French philosopher, I so clearly heard the voice of the narrator of What is Mathematics, Really? (and no doubt of many of the passages of his books with Davis) that I could honestly write back that I felt that I had known him for decades, though we have never met and until that time we had never exchanged a single word.