Arthur Eddington Quotes
The mathematics is not there till we put it there.
Eddington, Arthur S. The Philosophy of Physical Science. Cambridge University Press, 1939, p. 137.
Although there are applied Mathematicians and Statisticians striving for utility of their work, most of the great breakthroughs, both practical and theoretical, have been made by the theoretical mathematicians.
This is an amazing quotation. It was not until the last 50 years that biologists have come to realize that mathematics is essential to their understanding of the science, just like chemistry and physics. For years biology was a science that did not require mathematics as a prerequisite for study. With the exception of a few holdouts, biology had come of age—an age predicted by Comte. This has placed more pressure on the high schools which used to counsel students that if they did not like mathematics or take it, they could go into biology. No longer is that reality.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston. In mathematics the numbers can count people, autos, sins, molecules, or paintings. The mathematician does not know or care. And the mathematics is the same regardless. And the fundamentals themselves are unknown. For example, what is a number? It’s not the symbol we write; that is a numeral. Some say that it is an abstract idea that represents a quantity like 5. But what is 5? That itself is an abstraction. So few mathematicians and no layman know what they are talking about when they do mathematics. Lord Russell, with his colleague Whitehead, built up a system where they could define a number as a set with certain properties. But they take 3 large volumes full of equations in a small type font to just get to 3rd grade arithmetic and knowing what they are talking about. In politics, we also often do not know what we are talking about, but that is for a much simpler set of reasons.
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington OM FRS was an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. He was also a philosopher of science and a populariser of science. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour.
