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Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Mathematics
Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith
Throughout history, application rather than abstraction has been the prominent driving force in mathematics. From the compass and sextant to partial differential equations, mathematical advances were spurred by the desire for better navigation tools, weaponry, and construction methods. But the religious upheaval in Victorian England and the fledgling United States opened the way for the rediscovery of pure mathematics, a tradition rooted in Ancient Greece.
In Equations from God, Daniel J. Cohen captures the origins of the rebirth of abstract mathematics in the intellectual quest to rise above common existence and touch the mind of the deity. Using an array of published and private sources, Cohen shows how philosophers and mathematicians seized upon the beautiful simplicity inherent in mathematical laws to reconnect with the divine and traces the route by which the divinely inspired mathematics of the Victorian era begot later secular philosophies.
In Equations from God, Daniel J. Cohen captures the origins of the rebirth of abstract mathematics in the intellectual quest to rise above common existence and touch the mind of the deity. Using an array of published and private sources, Cohen shows how philosophers and mathematicians seized upon the beautiful simplicity inherent in mathematical laws to reconnect with the divine and traces the route by which the divinely inspired mathematics of the Victorian era begot later secular philosophies.
- GenresTheologyMathematics
255 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 1, 2007
8 people are currently reading
28 people want to read
About the author
Daniel J. Cohen
4 books3 followersDaniel J. Cohen is the founding Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America, which is bringing together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and making them freely available to the world.
Until 2013 he was a Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. My personal research has been in digital humanities, broadly construed: the impact of new media and technology on all aspects of knowledge, from the nature of digitized resources to twenty-first century research techniques and software tools to the changing landscape of communication and publication.
Until 2013 he was a Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. My personal research has been in digital humanities, broadly construed: the impact of new media and technology on all aspects of knowledge, from the nature of digitized resources to twenty-first century research techniques and software tools to the changing landscape of communication and publication.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 22, 2017
Mathematics has always had two main branches -- applied and what is often called "pure." Applied math is what we do when we figure how much paint we need for a certain size of wall or try to balance our checkbook. It's also found in physics, design and engineering work. "Pure" math usually describes work with formulas or equations that are being used in the abstract. Their numerals or variables don't refer to any physical measurements or qualities. Work in this field can seem as much philosophy as math and, at least in the time of the ancient Greek originators of some of its fields, functioned the same way.
In fact, for some groups like students of Pythagoras, math and geometry were as much religion as anything else. When advances in calculation and working materials in the mid and late 1800's led to a resurgence of abstract math, a number of folks revived its connection to religion as well. Daniel J. Cohen in 2007's Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith traces the rise of this trend as well as its eventual end as mathematicians worked to professionalize their discipline.
Cohen starts by showing how the largely unchanging equations and laws of math offered security to a lot of folks bewildered by the rapid pace of technological change during the 19th century. Equations related to each other and their concepts moved and changed completely independently of things that happened in the "real world." The relationship between the lengths of the sides of a right triangle was the same whether the triangle was drawn on paper or existed only in the mind of the person thinking about it. This regularity in abstraction appealed to intellectual folks who were also devoted people of faith, as it seemed to offer a parallel to their religious understandings.
Cohen focuses on a handful of professors at schools in the United States and England, and the way their interest in math began to dominate their religious thinking and philosophy as well. They're all Unitarians or in some cases Deists, as those branches of faith had stronger appeal for the highly educated men involved in this loose movement. Some are names less well-known today than in their time, although George Boole's work in logic during the 1850s led to a lot of the concepts underlying modern computing and what's called "Boolean logic" in search engines. It's how you use AND or NOT in a search window to limit the results. Both Boole and his contemporary Augustus De Morgan used their pattern of logical formulation to describe their religious ideas and to try to falsify those of some opponents.
The end of the wave came as mathematicians moved to set themselves on a more professional footing, in part to reduce the attention they were having to pay to people who came up with flawed "solutions" to unsolvable problems, like the exact value of π. But the only way they could distance it and support the idea that mathematics was its own discipline was to trim away its connection to others, including theology. Narrow minds in both fields pushed against the idea of bridges between them and helped contribute to a supposed gulf between faith and science or scientific ideas that many accept as real today.
Cohen doesn't have a tight focus on the non-mathematical aspects of his subjects lives, and although the biographical details humanize them he doesn't always draw clear connections between the facts he includes and their bearing on the math-theology connection which his book is supposed to explore. DeMorgan especially was prone to feuds with other scientists, such as Michael Faraday, and we don't learn exactly why the details of it bear on the central idea. To some extent Boole and certainly De Morgan aren't really religious as much as they are spiritual or metaphysical, but they do apply their work to some religious themes.
But math can hold the same appeal for the intellectual and religious today as it did in the 19th century, and so Equations offers a quick picture of a time when the idea of a religious scientist was not the oxymoron limited thinkers would hold it to be today.
Original available here.
In fact, for some groups like students of Pythagoras, math and geometry were as much religion as anything else. When advances in calculation and working materials in the mid and late 1800's led to a resurgence of abstract math, a number of folks revived its connection to religion as well. Daniel J. Cohen in 2007's Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith traces the rise of this trend as well as its eventual end as mathematicians worked to professionalize their discipline.
Cohen starts by showing how the largely unchanging equations and laws of math offered security to a lot of folks bewildered by the rapid pace of technological change during the 19th century. Equations related to each other and their concepts moved and changed completely independently of things that happened in the "real world." The relationship between the lengths of the sides of a right triangle was the same whether the triangle was drawn on paper or existed only in the mind of the person thinking about it. This regularity in abstraction appealed to intellectual folks who were also devoted people of faith, as it seemed to offer a parallel to their religious understandings.
Cohen focuses on a handful of professors at schools in the United States and England, and the way their interest in math began to dominate their religious thinking and philosophy as well. They're all Unitarians or in some cases Deists, as those branches of faith had stronger appeal for the highly educated men involved in this loose movement. Some are names less well-known today than in their time, although George Boole's work in logic during the 1850s led to a lot of the concepts underlying modern computing and what's called "Boolean logic" in search engines. It's how you use AND or NOT in a search window to limit the results. Both Boole and his contemporary Augustus De Morgan used their pattern of logical formulation to describe their religious ideas and to try to falsify those of some opponents.
The end of the wave came as mathematicians moved to set themselves on a more professional footing, in part to reduce the attention they were having to pay to people who came up with flawed "solutions" to unsolvable problems, like the exact value of π. But the only way they could distance it and support the idea that mathematics was its own discipline was to trim away its connection to others, including theology. Narrow minds in both fields pushed against the idea of bridges between them and helped contribute to a supposed gulf between faith and science or scientific ideas that many accept as real today.
Cohen doesn't have a tight focus on the non-mathematical aspects of his subjects lives, and although the biographical details humanize them he doesn't always draw clear connections between the facts he includes and their bearing on the math-theology connection which his book is supposed to explore. DeMorgan especially was prone to feuds with other scientists, such as Michael Faraday, and we don't learn exactly why the details of it bear on the central idea. To some extent Boole and certainly De Morgan aren't really religious as much as they are spiritual or metaphysical, but they do apply their work to some religious themes.
But math can hold the same appeal for the intellectual and religious today as it did in the 19th century, and so Equations offers a quick picture of a time when the idea of a religious scientist was not the oxymoron limited thinkers would hold it to be today.
Original available here.
May 23, 2014
History books fall into 3 categories. Pure factual: names, dates and places. Facts organized into stories that resonate not only in the past but also now. And somewhere in-between. This book unfortunately is in-between. The author does a pretty good job of telling the history of math through the Victorian age. But he fails at making it more than that. The most interesting thing that the book purports to talk about is how people's faith was affected, and while there are the stories, nothing that scales. I was expecting to be "wowed" but instead ended up in "meh" territory.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews