Absent-Minded Mathematicians

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 62, 30 August 1940, Page 6

Absent-Minded Mathematicians

T manner of men were the great mathematicians who made the epoch-making discoveries which mark the progress of mathematical science? The popular idea of a great mathematician is coloured by the stories told about the absentmindedness of Archimedes and Newton. Most people have heard how Archimedes was worried over the question of how to decide whether the crown of King Hiero was of pure gold or of base metal gilded over, and how he was so thrilled when, in his bath, there came to him the idea that the comparison of the weight of the crown and its weight when it hung suspended in water would give him the test he sought,

that he leaped out and ran through the streets of Syracuse shouting, "I have found it." Only slightly less familiar is the tradition that he was put to death by a Roman soldier as he lay on the ground poring over some geometrical diagrams which he had drawn in the sand, while the army of Marcellus ravaged the city, just captured after a three

years’ blockade. Many schoolboys have chuckled over the picture of Newton’ standing gazing at an egg held in his hand while his watch boiled merrily in the pan. Yet there is some basis of reason for such peculiar actions, Mathematical research demands intense concentration, and when that is practised till it becomes a habit, the mathematian is apt to become absorbed in his thoughts and totally unconscious of surrounding persons or things. In this way he gains a reputation for eccentricity. Sylvester has described how, when he was an actuary for a London insurance company, he discovered and developed the theory of binary forms. He says: "It was done at one sitting, with a decanter of port wine to sustain nature’s flagging energies, in a back office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The work was done at the cost of rack-

ing thoughf-a brain on fire and feet feeling, or feelingless, as if plunged in an ice-pail. That night we slept no more."-(Professor R,. T. J. Bell, "The Human Side of Mathematics," 4YA August 13).