James Joseph Sylvester: Mathematitian and "poet".

There is a rather interesting transcribed speech here which discusses the poetical efforts of J. J. Sylvester, who was the first Jew to hold a professorship at Oxford. In particular, as mentioned by Bell, he wrote a poem called, "To a missing member of a family of terms in an algebraical formula" which starts as such:

Lone and discarded one! divorced by fate,
From thy wished-for fellows--whither art flown?
Where lingerest thou in thy bereaved estate,
Like some lost star or buried meteor stone?

So yeah, his math was better than his poetry.

What I'm Reading: Men of Mathematics

Men of Mathematics by Eric Temple Bell is a collection of personal and professional biographies of thirty great mathematicians. The first three are from ancient Greece: Zeno, Eudoxus, and Archimedes. The others are from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, from Descartes to Cantor.

It was written in 1937, which shows. Not just when the author refers to Bertrand Russell in the present tense, but also, for example, when he mentions in the introduction that certain "writers and artists (some from Hollywood)" have been interested in "how many of the great mathematicians have been perverts." ("None.")

The great thing about this book is the richness of detail Bell gives in the details of the subjects' personal lives. One gets the sense that Bell cares for the mathematicians personally, and also that there is a distinct lack of objectivity here. Gauss in particular is the recipient of torrents of praise. Anyone who opposed or insulted him, or who he disliked, is savaged, usually hilariously.

For example, Napoleon apparently once told Laplace that he would read his book "the first free month he could find." Bell, after relating this, proceeds to write that "Newton and Gauss might have been equal to the task; Napoleon no doubt could have turned the pages in his month without greatly tiring himself."

Later in the chapter, Bell mentions that Gauss didn't like Lord Byron, then goes on to describe the poet in terms of "posturing", "reiterated world-weariness", "affected misanthropy", and "histrionics". He then points out that "no man who guzzled good brandy and pretty women as assiduously as Byron did could be so very weary of the world as the naughty young poet with the flashing eye and the shaking hand pretended to be."

Right now, I'm on the chapter about William Hamilton. It starts with relating that when Hamilton was thirteen he knew a language for every year of his life. Bell does not approve. ("Good God! What was the sense of it all?") At fourteen he wrote a letter of welcome to the Persian Ambassador, in Persian, which Bell imagines may have been responsible for the Ambassador giving an excuse to avoid meeting him. According to an article of Nature (from 1883!) I found on Google Books, it read like this:

As the heart of the worshiper is turned towards the altar of his sacred vision, and as the sunflower to the rays of the sun, so to thy polished radiance turns expanding itself the yet unblossomed rosebud of my mind, desiring warmer climates whose fragrancy and glorious splendor appear to warm and embalm the orbit about thee, the Star of the State, of brilliant lustre.

The article says it was received warmly.

So all in all, this book is amusing and a good read for those interested in the personalities behind the major mathematical discoveries of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. But while Bell was an accomplished mathematician in his own right, Men of Mathematics is in large part a work of opinion, and does not in all cases possess the rigor that history is capable of having.

An issue of terminology.

Wheel in the Sky

The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

The article can be found here. The main idea can be summed up as

...it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what the universe is.

I can think of four systems of elements that supposedly categorize all things. Two are from history, the Western classical elements and the Chinese version. One is from a game, and one is something else entirely. There are surely more, as many as imagination allows, and that is the key.

At the end of Maybe Logic, there are exercises. One of them is to gather a bunch of arbitrary objects and divide them into two categories in as many different ways as possible. This is a concrete demonstration of the principle that categories are a mental phenomenon and not a property of the universe-as-such. Thus philosophical attempts to discover the "true nature" of the "real categories" of the objects in the universe are misguided.

Spring Break: Alchemical Texts and Darwin Art

I went to new Haven for spring break.

The Beinecke Rare book and Manuscript Library has several interesting past, current, and future exhibitions dealing with the history of math and science. For example, "Trees in Fact and Fable" examines its subject from several disciplines, including botany. There is one about mathematics in early modern England, an International Year of Astronomy exhibition called "Starry Messenger", and some works on alchemy in the European imagination. (I got to see that one.)

Also at Yale, the Yale Center for British Art is hosting an exhibition called "Endless Forms": Charles Darwin, Natural Science, and the Visual Arts (site here). It deals with the effect the publication of Origin of Species had on the arts world. It includes scientific diagrams, paintings depicting prehistoric humans and other creatures, fanciful illustrations of past humanity, Romantic depictions of "the struggle for existence", and photographs of non-European people meant for the scientific study of race. Or I might say pseudo-scientific.

Science and Math Tattoos

Check out the Science Tattoo Emporium. One interesting thing is that many people who get tattoos involving the DNA molecule use it for its heavy symbolic content. For example, here, here, here, and my favorite here.