Folha: 'Mathematics and Darwin's bulldog'
Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S. Paulo.
" Mathematics , which knows nothing of observation, experimentation, induction, or causality." It is therefore useless for any scientific purpose. This was the unflattering view that the British scientist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) had of what the German Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) called "the queen of sciences."
In his time, Huxley was one of the most respected (and feared) scientists in the world, with important contributions to zoology, geology, and anthropology. His intellectual interests extended beyond these fields, including, for example, religion. Such was his intellectual stature that Adrian Desmond, one of his biographers, wrote: "By around 1870, science was synonymous with Professor Huxley."
But what shaped his reputation for future generations was, more than anything else, the energy and pleasure with which he engaged in various scientific disputes. The same biographer also wrote that, "with his pugilistic fame, Huxley's name was in the newspapers almost every week."
The most famous of these disputes was in defense of the theory of evolution, proposed by Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Having contributed to the topic himself, Huxley became convinced that his colleague was further ahead and on the right track, and set out to convince everyone of this fact, by fair means or foul. He was so determined that he became known as "Darwin's bulldog."
In fact, the two men could not have had more different personalities. Darwin was discreet and reserved, and had a deep admiration for mathematics: "I deeply regret not having advanced enough to understand at least something of the great fundamental principles of mathematics, for people endowed with this knowledge seem to possess an extra sense."
We don't know exactly where Huxley's view of mathematics originated. Did it have something to do with the fact that his father was a professor of the subject? In other areas, he showed brilliance from a very young age. At 17, he had already conceived a system that divided the domains of knowledge into two groups: objective (physics, physiology, and history) and subjective (metaphysics, theology, logic, and… mathematics). In fact, his view of mathematics worsened over the years. "The mathematician begins with a few statements, the proof of which is so obvious that they are considered self-evident, and the rest of his work consists in making subtle deductions from them," he later wrote.
Huxley was not the first to question the usefulness of mathematics, nor will he be the last. It is a discussion that has not died out even in our time, an era in which the applications of mathematical knowledge are literally everywhere (although they are not always easy to identify). But Huxley's reputation, and the fact that he published his comments on "mathematics that knows nothing" in two widely circulated journals, particularly bothered the mathematical community: someone had to give a forceful response!