Men of Mathematics (4 page)

In other instances, however, the credit for some great advance is not always justly placed, and the man who first used a new method more powerfully than its inventor sometimes gets more than his due. This seems to be the case, for instance, in the highly important matter of the calculus. Archimedes had the fundamental notion of limiting sums from which the integral calculus springs, and he not only had the notion but showed that he could apply it. Archimedes also used the method of the differential calculus in one of his problems. As we approach Newton and Leibniz in the seventeenth century the history of the calculus becomes extremely involved. The new method was more than merely “in the air” before Newton and Leibniz brought it down to earth; Fermat actually had it. He also invented the method of Cartesian geometry independently of Descartes. In spite of indubitable facts such as these we shall follow tradition and ascribe to
each great leader what a majority vote says he should have, even at the risk of giving him a little more than his just due. Priority after all gradually loses its irritating importance as we recede in time from the men to whom it was a hotly contested cause of verbal battles while they and their partisans lived.

*  *  *

Those who have never known a professional mathematician may be rather surprised on meeting some, for mathematicians as a class are probably less familiar to the general reader than any other group of brain workers. The mathematician is a much rarer character in fiction than his cousin the scientist, and when he does appear in the pages of a novel or on the screen he is only too apt to be a slovenly dreamer totally devoid of common sense—comic relief. What sort of mortal is he in real life? Only by seeing in detail what manner of men some of the
great
mathematicians were and what kind of lives they lived, can we recognize the ludicrous untruth of the traditional portrait of a mathematician.

Strange as it may seem, not all of the great mathematicians have been professors in colleges or universities. Quite a few were soldiers by profession; others went into mathematics from theology, the law, and medicine, and one of the greatest was as crooked a diplomat as ever lied for the good of his country. A few have had no profession at all. Stranger yet, not all professors of mathematics have been mathematicians. But this should not surprise us when we think of the gulf between the average professor of poetry drawing a comfortable salary and the poet starving to death in his garret.

The lives that follow will at least suggest that a mathematician can be as human as anybody else—sometimes distressingly more so. In ordinary social contacts the majority have been normal. There have been eccentrics in mathematics, of course; but the percentage is no higher than in commerce or the professions. As a group the great mathematicians have been men of all-round ability, vigorous, alert, keenly interested in many things outside of mathematics and, in a fight, men with their full share of backbone. As a rule mathematicians have been bad customers to persecute; they have usually been capable of returning what they received with compound interest. For the rest they were geniuses of tremendous accomplishment marked off from the majority of their gifted fellowmen only by an irresistible impulse
to do mathematics. On occasion mathematicians have been (and some still are in France) extremely able administrators.

In their politics the great mathematicians have ranged over the whole spectrum from reactionary conservatism to radical liberalism. It is probably correct to say that as a class they have tended slightly to the left in their political opinions. Their religious beliefs have included everything from the narrowest orthodoxy—sometimes shading into the blackest bigotry—to complete skepticism. A few were dogmatic and positive in their assertions concerning things about which they knew nothing, but most have tended to echo the great Lagrange's “I do not know.”

Another characteristic calls for mention here, as several writers and artists (some from Hollywood) have asked that it be treated—the sex life of great mathematicians. In particular these inquirers wish to know how many of the great mathematicians have been perverts—a somewhat indelicate question, possibly, but legitimate enough to merit a serious answer in these times of preoccupation with such topics. None. Some lived celibate lives, usually on account of economic disabilities, but the majority were happily married and brought up their children in a civilized, intelligent manner. The children, it may be noted in passing, were often gifted far above the average. A few of the great mathematicians of bygone centuries kept mistresses when such was the fashionable custom of their times. The only mathematician discussed here whose life might offer something of interest to a Freudian is Pascal.

Returning for a moment to the movie ideal of a mathematician, we note that sloppy clothes have not been the invariable attire of great mathematicians. All through the long history of mathematics about which we have fairly detailed knowledge, mathematicians have paid the same amount of attention to their personal appearance as any other equally numerous group of men. Some have been fops, others slovens; the majority, decently inconspicuous. If today some earnest individual affecting spectacular clothes, long hair, a black sombrero, or any other mark of exhibitionism, assures you that he is a mathematician, you may safely wager that he is a psychologist turned numerologist.

The psychological peculiarities of great mathematicians is another topic in which there is considerable interest. Poincaré will tell us something about the psychology of mathematical creation in a later
chapter. But on the general question not much can be said till psychologists call a truce and agree among themselves as to what is what. On the whole the great mathematicians have lived richer, more virile lives than those that fall to the lot of the ordinary hard-working mortal. Nor has this richness been wholly on the side of intellectual adventuresomeness. Several of the greater mathematicians have had more than their share of physical danger and excitement, and some of them have been implacable haters—or, what is ultimately the same, expert controversialists. Many have known the lust of battle in their prime, reprehensibly enough, no doubt, but still humanly enough, and in knowing it they have experienced something no jellyfish has ever felt: “Damn braces, Bless relaxes,” as that devout Christian William Blake put it in his
Proverbs of Hell.

This brings us to what at first sight (from the conduct of several of the men considered here) may seem like a significant trait of mathematicians—their hair-trigger quarrelsomeness. Following the lives of several of these men we get the impression that a great mathematician is more likely than not to think others are stealing his work, or disparaging it, or not doing him sufficient honor, and to start a row to recover imaginary rights. Men who should have been above such brawls seem to have gone out of their way to court battles over priority in discovery and to accuse their competitors of plagiarism. We shall see enough dishonesty to discount the superstition that the pursuit of truth necessarily makes a man truthful, but we shall not find indubitable evidence that mathematics makes a man bad-tempered and quarrelsome.

Another “psychological” detail of a similar sort is more disturbing. Envy is carried up to a higher level. Narrow nationalism and international jealousies, even in impersonal pure mathematics, have marred the history of discovery and invention to such an extent that it is almost impossible in some important instances to get at the facts or to form a just estimate of the significance of a particular man's work for modern thought. Racial fanaticism—especially in recent times—has also complicated the task of anyone who may attempt to give an unbiased account of the lives and work of scientific men outside his own race or nation.

An impartial account of western mathematics, including the award to each man and to each nation of its just share in the intricate development, could be written only by a Chinese historian. He alone
would have the patience and the detached cynicism necessary for disentangling the curiously perverted pattern to discover whatever truth may be concealed in our variegated occidental boasting.

*  *  *

Even in restricting our attention to the modern phase of mathematics we are faced with a problem of selection that must be solved somehow. Before the solution adopted here is indicated it will be of interest to estimate the amount of labor that would be required for a detailed history of mathematics on a scale similar to that of a political history for any important epoch, say that of the French Revolution or the American Civil War.

When we begin unravelling a particular thread in the history of mathematics we soon get a discouraged feeling that mathematics itself is like a vast necropolis to which constant additions are being made for the eternal preservation of the newly dead. The recent arrivals, like some of the few who were shelved for perpetual remembrance 5000 years ago, must be so displayed that they shall seem to retain the full vigor of the manhood in which they died; in fact the illusion must be created that they have not yet ceased living. And the deception must be so natural that even the most skeptical archaeologist prowling through the mausoleums shall be moved to exclaim with living mathematicians themselves that mathematical truths are immortal, imperishable; the same yesterday, today, and forever; the very stuff of which eternal verities are fashioned and the one glimpse of changelessness behind all the recurrent cycles of birth, death, and decay our race has ever caught. Such may indeed be the fact; many, especially those of the older generation of mathematicians, hold it to be no less.

But the mere spectator of mathematical history is soon overwhelmed by the appalling mass of mathematical inventions that still maintain their vitality and importance for modern work, as discoveries of the past in any other field of scientific endeavor do not, after centuries and tens of centuries.

A span of less than a hundred years covers everything of significance in the French Revolution or the American Civil War, and less than five hundred leaders in either played parts sufficiently memorable to merit recording. But the army of those who have made at least one definite contribution to mathematics as we know it soon becomes
a mob as we look back over history; 6000 or 8000 names press forward for some word from us to preserve them from oblivion, and once the bolder leaders have been recognized it becomes largely a matter of arbitrary, illogical legislation to judge who of the clamoring multitude shall be permitted to survive and who be condemned to be forgotten.

This problem scarcely presents itself in describing the development of the physical sciences. They also reach far back into antiquity; yet for the most of them 350 years is a sufficient span to cover everything of importance to modern thought. But whoever attempts to do full, human justice to mathematics and mathematicians will have a wilderness of 6000 years in which to exercise such talents as he may have, with that mob of 6000 to 8000 claimants before him for discrimination and attempted justice.

The problem becomes more desperate as we approach our own times. This is by no means due to our closer proximity to the men of the two centuries immediately preceding our own, but to the universally acknowledged fact (among professional mathematicians) that the nineteenth century, prolonged into the twentieth, was, and is, the greatest age of mathematics the world has ever known. Compared to what glorious Greece did in mathematics the nineteenth century is a bonfire beside a penny candle.

What threads shall we follow to guide us through this labyrinth of mathematical inventions? The main thread has already been indicated: that which leads from the half-forgotten past to some of those dominating concepts which now govern boundless empires of mathematics—but which may themselves be dethroned tomorrow to make room for yet vaster generalizations. Following this main thread we shall pass by the
developers
in favor of the
originators.

Both inventors and perfectors are necessary to the progress of any science. Every explorer must have, in addition to his scouts, his followers to inform the world as to what he has discovered. But to the majority of human beings, whether justly or not is beside the point, the explorer who first shows the new way is the more arresting personality, even if he himself stumbles forward but half a step. We shall follow the originators in preference to the developers. Fortunately for historical justice the majority of the great originators in mathematics have also been peerless developers.

Even with this restriction the path from the past to the present may not always be clear to those who have not already followed it. So we may state here briefly what the main guiding clue through the whole history of mathematics is.

From the earliest times two opposing tendencies, sometimes helping one another, have governed the whole involved development of mathematics. Roughly these are the
discrete
and the
continuous.

The discrete struggles to describe all nature and all mathematics atomistically, in terms of distinct, recognizable individual elements, like the bricks in a wall, or the numbers 1,2,3, . . . The continuous seeks to apprehend natural phenomena—the course of a planet in its orbit, the flow of a current of electricity, the rise and fall of the tides, and a multitude of other appearances which delude us into believing that we know nature—in the mystical formula of Heraclitus: “All things flow.” Today (as will be seen in the concluding chapter), “flow,” or its equivalent, “continuity,” is so unclear as to be almost devoid of meaning. However, let this pass for the moment.

Intuitively
we
feel
that we
know
what is meant by “continuous motion”—as of a bird or a bullet through the air, or the fall of a raindrop. The motion is
smooth;
it
does not proceed by jerks;
it is
unbroken.
In
continuous
motion or, more generally, in the concept of continuity itself, the
individualized
numbers 1,2,3, . . . , are
not
the appropriate mathematical image.
All
the points on a segment of a straight line, for instance, have no such clear-cut individualities as have the numbers of the sequence 1,2,3, . . . , where
the step from one member of the sequence to the next is the same
(namely 1: 1 + 2 = 3, 1 + 3 = 4, and so on); for
between
any two points on the line segment, no matter how close together the points may be, we can always
find,
or at least
imagine, another
point:
there is no “shortest” step from one point to the “next.”
In fact there is no
next
point at all.