A Woman Explains Mathematics to Me

[Perry Noid]

AtD p. 594:

"Let me put it a different way. Whenever I see one, it reminds me of you.
The 'charmer' part anyway."
"Aaah! Even more trivial. Do none of you ever think beyond these walls?
There is a crisis out there." She scowled into the stained orange glow of
the just-vanished sun, the smoke rising from hundreds of chimneys.
"And Göttingen
is no more exempt than it was in Riemann's day, in the war with Prussia.
The political crisis in Europe maps int the crisis in mathematics.
Weierstrass functions, Cantor's continuum, Russell's equally inexhaustible
capacity for mischief--once, among nations, as in chess, suicide was
illegal. Once, among mathematicians, 'the infinite' was all but a
conjurer's convenience. The connections lie there, Kit--hidden and
poisonous. Those of us who must creep among them do so in peril."

The Weierstrass function. When Yashmeen materializes at the beginning of
this "chapter" Humfried sighs, "Those curves are everywhere continuous but
nowhere diferentiable" which is a description of the Weierstrass function.
And what is that mathematical crisis?
http://nautil.us/issue/11/light/maths-beautiful-monsters

I think we are facing another crisis, of identity maybe. Someone help me?
The Weierstrass function challenged the idea that math was modelling the
immediate physical world. But it is it's own thing, with different ideas.
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