JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

 This is the lovely response by the great mathematician J.J. Sylvester to Thomas Huxley’s muckety comment on the lack of imagination in the mathematical sciences.  Huxley’s remarks were made at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, stating that (mathematics) “is that study which knows nothing of observation, nothing of induction, nothing of experiment, nothing of causation”. This quote is taken from Sylvester’s quick and elegant responses in two articles in Nature, December 30, 1869 (pp 231-3) and January 6, 1870 (pp 261-3), as “A Plea for the Mathematician” and “A Plea for the Mathematician II”, part of which is reproduced below. “For Sylvester, the ability to be able to imagine  what the experience of space would be like in dimensions other than three is sufficient to establish the empirical basis of geometry–the three-dimensional Euclidean is not the science of space in general, but the science of the space of our experience.”–Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary ...by Jonathan Smith, pp 181-182.

I don’t know what the story was re maths with Darwin’s Bulldog.