Graybeard's Book Review Number 1:
~~~~~~~~~ Mathematics for the Million: How to Master the Magic of Numbers ~~~~~~~~~
By: Lancelot Hogben. 1937
I first came across this book, or at least part of it in an old compendium called 'The Treasury of Science'. The excerpt or chapter in the compendium was titled Mathematics: The Mirror of Civilisation.
I have not read the complete book as I don't yet have a copy.
The Author:
Lancelot Hogben was born in 1895 England, into a family of Plymouth Brethern. He forsook religion while a youth and took a degree in medicine at Trinity College Cambridge. He became a socialist and later in life called himself a scientific humanist. He died in 1975.
He was a pacifist and was imprisoned during the first world war as a conscientious objector. This despite the fact that he worked with the Red Cross in the front lines in France. In prison he was severely maltreated and became ill and had to be released in 1917. After the war he became a university lecturer in many disciplines and wrote many papers.
The Book:
The book is ambitious and is over 650 pages. It takes the layperson, who has little or no mathematical ability, but who has no objection to aquiring some, through the history of mathematics. In the main it treats mathematics as a language in which is recorded the history of civilisation. As each new discovery is mastered it records how the direction of society is irrevocably changed forever.
The Contents Page:- Mathematics in remote antiquity
- The Grammar of size, order and shape
- Euclid as a springboard
- Number Lore in antiquity
- The rise and decline of Alexandrian Culture
- The dawn of Nothing
- Mathematics for the Mariner
- The geometry of Motion
- Logarithms and the search for series
- The calculus of Newton and Liebnitz
- The algebra of the Chessboard
- The algebra of Choice and Chance
The rest consists of Tables, Answers and Index.
The Book is available from Amazon.com for US$12.21 new or second hand US$4.98. There are 41 copies left in total.
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Mi...rdr_bb_product
Do not be put off from this book by the maths. It is explained in simple and easy terms, but you will need a paper and pencil. Best to probably skip the logarithms chapter as your calculator can do this for you.
Excerpts:
In the ancient world writing and reading were still a mystery and a craft. The plain man could not decipher the Rhind papyrus in which the scribe Ahmes wrote down the laws of measuring things. Civilised societies in the 20th century have democraticised the reading and writing of
sort language. Consequently the plain man can understand scientific discoveries if they do not involve complicated measurements. he knows something about evolution. The priestly accounts of creation have fallen into discredit. So mysticism has to take refuge in the atom. The atom is a safe place not because it is small, but because you have to do complicated measurements and use underground channels to find your way there. .............. Three centuries ago, when priests conducted their services in Latin, Protestant reformers founded grammar schools so that people could read the open bible. The time has now come for another Reformation. People must learn to read and write the language of measurement so that they can understand the open bible of modern science.
The first men who dwelt in cities were
talking animals. The man of the machine age is a
calculating animal. We live in a welter of figures: cookery recipes, railway timetables, unemployment aggregates, fines, taxes, war debts, overtime schedules, speed limits, bowling averages, betting odds, billiard scores, calories, baby weights, clinical temperatures, rainfall, hours of sunshine, motoring records, power indices, gas-meter readings, bank rates, freight rates, death rates, discount, interest, lotteries, wave lengths and tire pressures. Every night when he winds up his watch, the modern man adjusts a scientific instrument of a precision and delicacy unimaginable to the most cunning artificers of Alexandria in its prime. So much is commonplace. What escapes our notice is that in doing these things we have learnt to use devices which presented the most tremendous difficulties to the most brilliant matematicians of antiquity. Ratios, Limits, acceleration are not remote abstractions, dimly apprehended by the solitary genius. They are photographed on every page of our existence.
We have no difficulty in answering questions which tortured the minds of very clever mathematicians in ancient times. This
is not because you and I are very clever people. It
is because we inherit a social culture which has suffered the impact of material forces foreign to the intellectual life of the ancient world.
The most brilliant intellect is a prisoner within its own social inheritance! Lancelot Hogben. 1937
He goes on to solve Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise (and many many others) in a few simple lines that firstly points out the difficulty that the Greeks had, bound by their social inheritance, and just how simple the solution is. You are left wondering why it ever gave you any pause for thought.
Here is another purple passage,
The difficulties the Greeks had, provides an example of a great social truth borne out by the whole history of human knowledge. Fruitful intellectual activity of the cleverest people draws its strength from the common knowledge which all of us share. Beyond a certain point clever people can never transcend the limitations of the social culture thay inherit. When clever people pride themselves on their own isolation, we may well wonder if they are very clever after all. Our studies in mathematics are going to show us that whenever the culture of a people loses contact with the common life of mankind and becomes exclusively the plaything of a leisure class, it is becoming a priestcraft. It is destined to end, as does all priestcraft, in superstition. To be proud of intellectual isolation from the common life of mankind and to be disdainful of the great social task of education is as stupid as it is wicked. it is the end of progress in knowledge.
History shows that superstitions are not manufactured by the common man. they are invented by neurotic intellectuals with little to do. The mathematician and the plain man each need one another. Maybe the western world is about to be plunged irrevocably into barbarism. If it escapes this fate, the men and women of the leisure state which is now within our grasp will regard the democratization of mathematics as a decisive step in the advance of civilisation.
Lancelot Hogben. 1937
Albert Einstein said of this book "It makes alive the contents of the elements of mathematics"
cool bananas ... greg
(If you found this review helpful, please say so and I will review others.)
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