Equations from God
Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith
Publication Year: 2007
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Contents
Download PDF (51.8 KB)
pp. vii-
Acknowledgments
Download PDF (40.6 KB)
pp. ix-x
A welcome side effect of pursuing the history of ideas is that it makes you acutely aware of your own intellectual indebtedness. I have been blessed with a string of outstanding advisors and mentors: John Williams and Donald Burke at Weston High School in Weston, Massachusetts; Gerald Geison at Princeton; ...
INTRODUCTION: The Allure of Pure Mathematics in the Victorian Age
Download PDF (73.2 KB)
pp. 1-13
On September 23, 1846, the Berlin astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle scanned the night sky with a telescope and found what he was looking for—the faint light of the planet Neptune. Excitement about the discovery of an eighth planet quickly spread across Europe and America, generating a wave of effusive front-page headlines. ...
CHAPTER ONE: Heavenly Symbols: Sources of Victorian Mathematical Idealism
Download PDF (130.8 KB)
pp. 14-41
Victorian intellectuals seeking philosophical support for a grand characterization of mathematics did not have to look far afield. One ally was the prominent contemporary philosopher William Whewell (1794–1866), the master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1840s and 1850s.1 ...
CHAPTER TWO: God and Math at Harvard: Benjamin Peirce and the Divinity of Mathematics
Download PDF (168.0 KB)
pp. 42-76
The Victorian congruence of pure mathematics and religious idealism found its greatest advocate in perhaps the most prominent American mathematician of the nineteenth century: Benjamin Peirce. Peirce, generally known today only as the father of Charles Sanders Peirce, the seminal philosopher of Pragmatism, ...
CHAPTER THREE: George Boole and the Genesis of Symbolic Logic
Download PDF (144.4 KB)
pp. 77-105
George Boole had a revelation at the age of seventeen that changed both his life and the course of Western philosophy. He spoke in spiritual and mystical terms about the insight gained in this epiphany, which forever separated modern logic from the logic of Aristotle and the Scholastics. ...
CHAPTER FOUR: Augustus De Morgan and the Logic of Relations
Download PDF (156.4 KB)
pp. 106-136
An insignia designed by Augustus De Morgan for the nascent London Mathematical Society perhaps typifies the ecumenism of pure mathematicians in the Victorian age better than George Boole’s poetry or Benjamin Peirce’s prose. De Morgan inscribed a symmetric figure of concentric arcs and triangles with the name of the organization, ...
CHAPTER FIVE: Earthly Calculations:Mathematics and Professionalism in the Late Nineteenth Century
Download PDF (227.7 KB)
pp. 137-182
Augustus De Morgan’s determination that mathematics should separate itself from other realms of Victorian intellectual life, although shrewd, was not a self-fulfilling prophecy. To achieve this distinction required an aggressive promotion of the new isolationist ideal within mathematical circles as well as in the public sphere. ...
Notes
Download PDF (129.9 KB)
pp. 183-214
Bibliography
Download PDF (99.2 KB)
pp. 215-234
Index
Download PDF (587.1 KB)
pp. 235-242
E-ISBN-13: 9780801891861
E-ISBN-10: 0801891868
Print-ISBN-13: 9780801885532
Print-ISBN-10: 0801885531
Page Count: 256
Publication Year: 2007
Series Title: Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Mathematics
Series Editor Byline: Ronald Calinger, Series Editor
