alt Hacker NewsThe article links to a series of letters between Fermat, Pascal, and Carcavi which are wonderfully intelligent and readable, while also deeply kind and personal.
> 1. I have been delighted to have had the thoughts conformed to those of M. Pascal, for I admire infinitely his genius and I believe him very capable of coming to the end of all that which he will undertake. The friendship that he offers me is so dear to me and so considerable that I must have no difficulty in making some use of it in the publishing of my Treatises.
> Our blows always continue and I am as glad as you in the admiration that our thoughts are arranged so exactly that it seems that they have taken one same route and make one same path
It makes me wonder if future generations will look back on correspondences between guys like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
https://probabilityandfinance.com/pulskamp/Pascal/Sources/pa...
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In math, Grothendieck's correspondences are quite famous. Here's a book that is entirely 300 pages of letters between him and J.P. Serre
https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircl...
There are many others for Grothendieck though.
Another example is how Godel wrote a letter to Von Neumann towards the end of his life. This letter contained, among other things, the (now very funny) question of whether a certain NP complete problem may be solvable in quadratic time.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/15455-s17/hartmanis-on-gode...
Practically though, modern correspondence is often through a disjoint set of technologies, that (importantly) someone cleaning up the estate of a deceased person does not necessarily have access to. So it seems unlikely we'll get this kind of insight going forward (with notable exceptions, for example the Epstein emails).
> It makes me wonder if future generations will look back on correspondences between guys like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
We kinda had that, on Usenet, before spammers flooded it to death.
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Perhaps future generations will reference certain threads here on HN.