“Mathematics, which knows nothing about observation, experimentation, induction, causality.” Which is therefore useless for scientific purposes. This is the unflattering vision that the British scientist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) had of what the German Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) called “the queen of sciences”.
In his day, Huxley was one of the most respected (and feared) scientists in the world, with important contributions in zoology, geology and anthropology. His intellectual interests went further, including for example religion. Such was his intellectual stature that Adrian Desmond, one of his biographers, wrote: “In the 1870s science was synonymous with Professor Huxley. »
But what shaped his reputation among future generations was above all the energy and pleasure with which he engaged in various scientific disputes. The same biographer also wrote that “thanks to his pugilistic fame, Huxley’s name appeared in the newspapers almost every week.”
The most famous of these debates concerned the defense of the theory of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Having contributed to the topic himself, Huxley was convinced that his colleague was further along and on the right track and set out to convince everyone of this fact, for better or worse. With such determination that he became nicknamed “Darwin’s Bulldog”.
In fact, the two men couldn’t have more different personalities. Darwin was quiet and reserved, and had a deep admiration for mathematics: “I deeply regret not having advanced far enough to understand at least something of the great fundamental principles of mathematics, for people endowed with this knowledge seem to possess an additional sense. »
We don’t really know where Huxley’s view of mathematics came from. Did it have anything to do with the fact that your father was a professor of a particular subject? On other subjects, he was brilliant from an early age. At 17, he had already designed a system that divided the areas of knowledge into two groups: objective (physics, physiology and history) and subjective (metaphysics, theology, logic and… mathematics). In fact, his view of mathematics deteriorated over the years. “The mathematician begins with a few statements whose proof is so obvious that they are taken for granted, and the rest of his work consists of drawing subtle deductions from them,” he later wrote.
Huxley was not the first, nor the last, to question the usefulness of mathematics. It’s a debate that hasn’t gone away even today, in an age where applications of mathematical knowledge are literally everywhere (even if they’re not always easy to identify). But Huxley’s reputation and the fact that he published his comments on “know-nothing mathematics” in two popular magazines particularly upset the mathematical community: someone had to give a direct answer!
The chosen one was the famous British algebraist James Joseph Sylvester (1814-1897), at the 1869 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Don’t miss it next week!
PRESENT LINK: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click on the blue F below.
About The Author
