Virtues of Priority
Abstract
The conjecture that every elliptic curve with rational coefficients is a so-called modular curve -- since 2000 a theorem due in large part to Andrew Wiles and, in complete generality, to Breuil-Conrad-Diamond-Taylor -- has been known by various names: Weil Conjecture, Taniyama-Weil Conjecture, Shimura-Taniyama-Weil Conjecture, or Shimura-Taniyama Conjecture, among others. The question of the authorship of this conjecture, one of whose corollaries is Fermat's Last Theorem, has been the subject of a priority dispute that has often been quite bitter, but the principles behind one attribution or another have (almost) never been made explicit. The author proposes a reading inspired in part by the "virtue ethics" of Alasdair MacIntyre, analyzing each of the attributions as the expression of a specific value, or virtue, appreciated by the community of mathematicians.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2003.08242,
title = {Virtues of Priority},
author = {Michael Harris},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.08242},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
This article was written in response to an invitation by a group of philosophers as part of "a proposal for a special issue of the philosophy journal Synth\`ese on virtues and mathematics," but was ultimately rejected because (as the author readily admits) it is not a philosophy paper