Robert M. Hutchins Quotes
Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician.
Hutchins, Robert M. The Higher Learning in America. Yale University Press, 1936, p. 84.
Feynman generally emphasized the importance of a scientist understanding the mathematics of his/her subject, especially where nature's complexities abounded. At the time few appreciated the importance in the biological sciences of mathematics which we know today is so essential.
Mathematical analysis is a much sounder method for determining truth than argument but it only is applicable where the real world fits the mathematical structures that we have which unfortunately is not enough to answer most of the political questions facing us.
For many scientists, this is the goal of each area of inquiry. For others, the science is crude and really not understood unless the mathematical model exists and can be verified experimentally. For Thompson, this was the difference between understanding and not.
Robert Maynard Hutchins was an American educational philosopher. He was president (1929–1945) and chancellor (1945–1951) of the University of Chicago, and earlier dean of Yale Law School (1927–1929). He was the husband of novelist Maude Hutchins. Although his father and grandfather were both Presbyterian ministers, Hutchins became one of the most influential members of the school of secular perennialism.
