Go Figure
"What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?" asked the wit and cleric Sydney Smith in 1835, but it has to be admitted that not everyone has been so enthusiastic. In Latin, the word mathematicus can mean both "mathematician" and "astrologer", and this has given rise to the traditional warning, "The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all who make empty prophecies." One person at least needed no such warning: in the early part of the 19th century, the child author Marjorie Fleming declared, "The most devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7 it is what nature itself can't endure." Towards the end of the century, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Randolph Churchill experienced a similar frustration, this time with the decimal point: "I never could make out what those damned dots meant."
Advice on how to cope in such circumstances can be found in the 20th century from the American mathematician John von Neuman, "In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." But it is possible to find more positive views. Bertrand Russell thought that "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possess not only truth, but supreme beauty." Earlier, the French writer Stendhal said that he loved mathematics for its own sake,"because it allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness". And reaching back into the distance of the thirteenth century we find the endorsement of Roger Bacon, philosopher, scientist, and Franciscan friar, "If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behoves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics."
Elizabeth Knowles
30/03/2004
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