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.
And:
"I of course am not so absurd as to maintain that the habit of observation of external nature will be best or in any degree cultivated by the study of mathematics at all events as that study is at present conducted and no one can desire more earnestly than myself to see natural and experimental science introduced into our schools as a primary and indispensable branch of education. I think that that study and mathematical culture should go on hand in hand together and that they would greatly influence each other for their mutual good. I should rejoice to see mathematics taught with that life and animation which the presence and example of her young and buoyant sister could not fail to impart short roads preferred to long ones. Euclid honourably shelved or buried deeper than did ever plummet sound out of the schoolboy's reach morphology introduced into the elements of Algebra projection correlation and motion accepted as aids to geometry the mind of the student quickened and elevated and his faith awakened by early initiation into the ruling ideas of polarity, continuity, infinity, and familiarization with the doctrine of the imaginary and inconceivable."
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