Advancing science : being personal reminiscences of the British Association in the nineteenth century / by Sir Oliver Lodge.

  • Lodge, Oliver, Sir, 1851-1940.
Date:
1931
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Advancing science : being personal reminiscences of the British Association in the nineteenth century / by Sir Oliver Lodge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Association, but had not expected to find one so close and accessible. I had heard echoes of Sylvester’s remarkable address at Exeter, in 1869, when he was President of Section A, and when Stokes was President of the whole. In this address Sylvester eloquently depicts the soul of the pure mathematician, and vigor¬ ously contests the statement attributed to Huxley in “ The Fortnightly Review ” (though it might have been said by many people), that Mathematics “ is that study which knows nothing of observation, nothing of induction, nothing of experiment, nothing of causa¬ tion.” Sylvester claims that no statement could have been more opposite to the facts of the case, and he gives examples to illustrate. For instance, he says that a single invariant was accidentally observed by Eisenstein “ (the Quadrinvariant of a Binary Quartic) which he met with in the course of certain researches just as accidentally and unexpectedly as M. du Chaillu might meet a Gorilla.” He goes on to recite an observation of his own : “ Were it not unbecoming to dilate on one’s personal experience, I could tell a story of almost romantic interest about my own latest researches in a field where Geometry, Algebra, and the Theory of Numbers melt in a surprising manner into one another, like sunset tints or the colours of the dying dolphin, ‘ the last still loveliest ’ (a sketch of which has just appeared in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society), which would very strikingly illustrate how much