Nearly every mathematician I know uses computers in their work in one form or another - at the very least they're an easy way to do calculation that would otherwise take up too much time and energy. But an article like this seems to miss the point entirely.
There are two issues here: the first is that using a computer to check cases or run lengthy computations doesn't affect the worthiness of the math; you're not going to get shunted off to a computational journal for that. The second is that a proof that is actually found by a computer is not that interesting from a math standpoint. It's nice to know a theorem is true, but mathematicians have been proving theorems based on unknown facts for thousands of years.
Stephen Goldman, possibly the best baseball writer of the last 25 years not from Kansas, wrote about similar issues in the baseball community. Computers in math, and the new (mainly statistical) methodologies used in baseball are just tools, and correspondingly can be used for good or evil. But dismissing them out of hand is foolish.
Posted by Spencer at April 8, 2004 02:10 AM