The Politics of Systems

Last Friday, I received an exciting present in the mail: Dénes König’s Theorie der endlichen und unendlichen Graphen from 1936, the first textbook on graph theory ever written (thank you Universitätsbibliothek der FU Berlin for not wanting it anymore). When reading the introduction, I stumbled over this beautiful quote:

Vielleicht noch mehr als der Berührung der Menschheit mit der Natur verdankt die Graphentheorie der Berührung der Menschen untereinander.

Here is my translation, although it does not do justice to the poetry of the German quote (Dativ FTW!):

Perhaps even more than to the contact between mankind and nature, graph theory owes to the contact of human beings between each other.