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## Hermann Weyl on Tax Laws

“Our federal income tax law defines the tax y to be paid in terms of the income x; it does so in a clumsy enough way by pasting several linear functions together, each valid in another interval or bracket of income. An archeologist who, five thousand years later from now, shall unearth some of our income tax returns together with relics of engineering works and mathematical books, will probably date them a couple of centuries earlier, certainly before Galileo and Vieta. Vieta was instrumental in introducing a consistent algebraic symbolism. Galileo discovered the quadratic law of falling bodies $\frac{1}{2} gt^2$ […] by this formula Galileo converted a natural law inherent in the actual motion of bodies into an a priori constructed mathematical function, and that is what physics endeavors to accomplish for every phenomenon […]. This law is much better design than our tax laws. It has been designed by nature, who seems to lay her plans with a fine sense for simplicity and harmony. But then nature is not, as our income and excess profits tax laws are, hemmed in having to be comprehensible to our legislators and chambers of commerce. […]”
(Hermann Weyl, Excerpted from “Levels of Infinity”, Essay 3: “The Mathematical Way of Thinking”, Originally published in Science, 1940).
With the tax season in mind, I was thinking that not much has changed since 1940!

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